Brief Pauses in Mouse Pointer Movement

[John McGanty]

When I try to move the mouse pointer on my new XP
computer, it often pauses momentarily, before moving to
it's new location. It's as if there is a process running
in the background that briefly uses all of the machine's
computing power, preventing the pointer from responding
immediately to movements of the mouse. However, I only
have Office applications running on the machine, and it
has a Pentium 700MHz with plenty of RAM. I'd certainly
appreciate insights anyone has for correcting this
problem. Thanks much!

-- John

 

[Brian Smither]

This happened to me when I was running McAfee's Anti-Virus, both version 4
and 7. Every 25-30 seconds the mouse pointer would stop for a split-second.
It just refused to move as opposed pausing then rapidly catching up. That
is, if I moved the mouse in a circular pattern, the pointer would begin
drawing a different circle at the point where it left off drawing when it
froze.

Disabling McAfee's dynamic scanning would stop the behavior. It did'nt
affect the COM1 mouse, just the USB mouse (don't have a PS/2 mouse
connected). Your mileage may vary.

 

[Pam]

I am just recently having the same problem. I have a standard USB mouse and
do not have McAfee.
I have EZ Antivirus and run ZoneAlarm free as I have done for quite a long
time without this trouble. I've checked to make sure that messages are not
being compacted in the background with Outlook Express, too.
I was wondering if it had something to do with my cable connection since
Comcast recently took attbi and there were some problems.
Pam

 

[PCuser21]

I'm also getting something like this 5 years later. Has anyone ever given an answer for this sort of thing? I have XP SP2, a Q6600 Quad core, 4 gigs of ram, and other things. The system isn't small.

I just noticed this thread doing a search for my problem on google. Has anyone ever given any reasons for why this happens?

 

[Argonaut747]

I just has this.
I've got a Quad Core too with 3Gig of RAM.
I think I've figured this out.
svchost was updating something to do with Plug and Play. This would interfere with USB mouse operations as my mouse is USB.
Processor usage was at 25% (1 core?) and not much RAM used either but the mouse still juddered, so nothing to do with CPU/RAM usage. On a single core system I can image the CPU usage being 100%, (I think this happened on my old XP system).

By chance I also had Device Manager open and this was refreshing every 20 seconds or so.

I used Process Explorer to identify what the svchost was accessing.
I am running Vista Home Premium so it may be different in XP.

After about 10min everything went back to normal.

I concluded some PnP Library was beining updated/refreshed hence the delay in pointer movement.

I'm no computer genius but it all seems logical to me.

Take care and be good.

 

[a07sturner]

I had the same problem also on a high spec PC. Although I still have the problem, it only happens every hour or so. Look for a graphics card driver, there is a good change of it being out of date. Mine`s a brand new Nvidia, and it was that that was slowing down my mouse reactions.