Mouse jumps all over the screen

Racefan3231,

Thanks for using the Dell Community Forum.

The most common reason an optical mouse would jump all over is the mouse pad or the surface the mouse is on.  Try using a blank piece of white paper and see what happens. 

 

Well, I am having the exact same problem on two different Dell Dimension 3000 computers. In both cases, the mouse cursor jumps around randomly. The surface that it is being used upon is the Dell mousepad :) Under that is a varnished pine desk. I have never encountered this behaviour in any other circumstance, and have not had the opportunity to test out a different mouse.

So what now?

Another potential cause for erratic mouse is if yoy are using speech recognition and the mic is not muted.

" Another potential cause for erratic mouse is if yoy are using speech recognition and the mic is not muted."

Well, that's not it ;)

i'm having the same issue... it happens sporatically for me... dell optical mouse on dell's mousepad...

I seen it happen as far apart as 5-6 min... to as frequently as every 30 seconds.

 

It only happens for a brief moment ( < 1 sec ) then i regain control.

 

 

Ok after doing some research this problem seems to be fairly common with the dell optical mouse.

Here's a link I found, hopefully it helps.

http://www.slingcode.com/dell/jumpingmouse.php

Now the model number he recieved for a replacement, is the model # i have now with the problem. I contacted dell support today and now have a new mouse en route.

I'll update if it fixes the issue.

 

Ld

Well, that would explain that when I went and bought a Logitech mouse at Staples it did the same thing. Is there no fix other than getting a replacement mouse from Dell?

I believe I have just solved this problem on my Dell Inspirion 4000, ( I have a laptop and I'm using XP Professional ) From some great people at www.annoyances.org I learned that what I needed to do was disable my touchpad.  I was directed to do so in my BIOS, being somewhat computer illiterate, I had no idea how to do this so I went in and dowloaded an updated BIOS, I do not know if that helped or not, but then I created a new hardware profile by going to control panel, performance and maintenance, system, hardware profile, copied the first profile renamed it so I could create a profile, but I had no options for altering this profile, so I downloaded drivers for a Synaptics Driver, I was then able to go to printers and other hardware, and then to mouse and lo and behold, I had a device setting which allowed me to disable the pointing stick (I did this on the recommendation of a dell network solution article - Erratic Pointer Movement {Dell tm Inspiron tm, Latitude tm, and Precision tm Mobile Workstations} which I found using my service tag.  Their instruction were to disable the pointing stick in Miccrosoft Windows, I do note my touchpad is still working, so only time will tell if this will really do it, but I at least have some options to go in and disable or enable, whereas before those options were not there I assume because the drivers were not updated.  Hope this helps you at least get a little farther in resolving the problem.

.. and if we don't have a touchpad, but still have the jumping mouse problem??

Message Edited by paulf3 on 10-22-2005 10:00 AM

Message Edited by HobbesIsReal on 10-24-2005 03:37 AM