Recently I have discovered that my mouse keeps freezing at random intervals. It happens every 10-20 minutes, in a batch of 3-4 freezes that last under one second each. I tried using a different USB slot for my mouse, and it still does it.
Any tips will be appreciated, thanks.
Hello Bloomey.
When you say "freeze" does the mouse cursor change to the icon that indicates that the system is busy (usually the windows hourglass or the Windows Vista/7 rotating circle)? If that's the type of "freezing" that you have then the problem is that something in your computer is using up huge amounts of CPU time. Check your system for viruses and malware if that's the case.
Does "freeze" mean cursor movement just stops? Have you tried connecting the mouse to different computer? If it still "freezes" on that other computer then we can conclude that the mouse has the problem. If it's an old ball mouse, try taking out the ball and cleaning out the mechanism. If it's an optical mouse (the one with the red light), then check that the surface of the table you are using is not too shiny (like glass). Use a mousepad for best results. Check the cable also. Mouse cables usually break due to the constant everyday movement of mice.
There would be several reasons why a mouse would freeze. One would be because the computer is busy trying to process certain tasks and with a slow computer, the mouse would then freeze and be erratic when this happens. This would also then be connected to a spyware or virus problem on the computer. Viruses would tend to make use of most if not all the resources on the machine and will make it crawl, this would result to the mouse movement being erratic as well. If you've tried a known working mouse, and it works fine, then this would definitely point to a hardware problem then. You need to replace your mouse in this case.
