Freezing Mouse Pointer
Since purchasing a few summers ago I have been plagued by a freezing mouse pointer on my Thinkpad T400 laptop. The mouse is a generic wireless.
The freeze I experienced is during disk operations. Moving the pointer is much like pushing strings. Within a couple of seconds the pointer returns to normal.
At least I thought the problem was disk operations. After suffering this problem I happened to stumble across what likely is the root cause. Disk operations was a mask to the actual root cause. I did not discover this until I created an iperf script to run as a cron job on my LAN. Nothing fancy. I only wanted to monitor basic connectivity.
Running iperf (old version) all but stopped the mouse pointer. While iperf supports using a file to test drive I/O impact (-F, --fileinput), I am not using that feature.
I saw the problem only on the laptop. Other than maintenance I use wireless with the laptop.
Could the laptop wireless be interfering with the mouse?
Apparently.
I changed the channel in the wireless configuration of my router from the default channel 6 to channel 7. I moved the mouse USB adapter to the other side of the laptop.
No more stalling or stuttering.
Posted: Category: Usability, Tutorial Tagged: General
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