One of the most annoying problems is the one that occurs when the mouse cursor blinks very incessantly and suddenly we see how everything slows down in front of our eyes. Which prevents us from continuing to work with the PC and believe it or not, it is a fairly common problem that affects many users. However, it is a nuisance and that is why we are going to teach you how to solve it in a simple way.
You are working, playing a game or doing some other activity and suddenly you see how the cursor starts blinking so fast that it becomes almost invisible. The refresh rate of the screen can’t keep up with the mouse and everything that happens on your PC starts to slow down. Both the processor and the graphics are put at 100% and you end up desperate. Have I bought a computer chestnut? It’s failing inside.
Why does my mouse cursor flicker and everything slows down?
We have to start from the fact that regardless of whether you are playing a video game or editing, for example, an image in Photoshop, a sense of movement has to be created. The rule is that for each movement we make with the mouse or when we press a key, the result is reflected in the form of a new frame or a succession of them. The fact is that the refresh rate of the mouse, with which its sensor interprets the movements we make with it, is much higher than that of a screen.
Today a pointer can work at a speed of 1 ms, that is, at 1000 Hz, but obviously there are no screens at that speed, so when moving our pointer. Each frame represents several readings of it. every how many? Well that will depend on the mouse driver. Which is one of the generic drivers for USB ports. The thing is that when the cursor blinks very intensely, what exists is a coordination problem between the mouse driver and the graphics card driver.
The slowdown? It comes from the same problem, the refresh rate of the mouse and the screen have been matched. That is, you are asking the CPU to generate the 1000-frame screen list in one second. This supposes an enormous overload of work that ends up saturating the system for such nonsense.
Is it a hardware problem?
Don’t worry, your PC isn’t slow and you don’t have a serious hardware problem either, but rather, as we have mentioned before, it is a problem in the mouse driver. Unfortunately, this is one of the generic Windows drivers and this is so that when you connect any of these devices you can use it directly. However, these are totally “dumb” in the sense that to interpret what the sensor of the mouse itself captures, it is the PC itself that interprets the data in order to present us with the movement of the cursor on the screen.
How to solve it?
So you are going to have to update the driver or see if it works well, for this you just have to follow the conventional procedure for these cases:
- Press the Windows and X keys at the same time and from the conceptual menu that appears, select Device Manager.
- Within the device manager window itself, devices that have the ability to move the pointer on the screen, i.e. conventional mice and trackpads are found under the category Mice and other pointing devices.
- We recommend that if you use a laptop with a Bluetooth or USB mouse, you disable the trackpad on the laptop.. If it appears in the form of a repeated name, simply disconnect the rest of the pointers and select by right clicking with the mouse disable device. don’t uninstall itsince that will cause it to detect it and reinstall it again with the next reboot or after a short time.
- Leave only one mouse on your system to avoid read conflicts that can lead to mouse flickering. That is, use only one, it does not matter if you prefer trackpad or conventional mouse.
- If it is a specific brand mouse, use the manufacturer’s driver and not the generic one. You should find it on its website with no problem, if the Windows repository is not able to find it.
Do not forget to keep the graphics card drivers up to date, since we remember that they are generally the other culprit of the problem. The process is the same as updating the mouse driver. Although in this case you must go to the manufacturer’s website to obtain them. In the event that you see that the problem persists, change the mouse.
