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Is your computer mouse developing a mind of its own?

2011/04/12 2 comments

We experienced an issue with a classroom teacher computer where the mouse pointer intermittently, but frequently jumped to the upper left corner of the screen, including setting focus there  – so that, when typing in a textbox, you were interrupted in the middle, or worse, if you type blind: sent a line of text “into Nirvana”, until you noticed you were trying to type “on the desktop” where the mouse had moved the focus from your text input.

Attempted, but failed fixes: adding a mouse pad, changing the USB port of the mouse, swapping the mouse hardware.

Some online research hinted at a pen-input device as possibly culprit. We indeed have one which is part of the Sympodium id-250 setup.

When we disabled the Sympodium driver from control panel / add remove programs, the erratic mouse pointer behavior went away.

This seems a radical solution, but we have a MS-approved solution for marking/highlighting (CTRL-F2) , typing (CTRL-F2, then t) and even zooming in (CTRL-F1) on portions of the screen during teaching: Sysinternals’ Screen Magnifier (formerly ZoomIt). Let’s see how this is getting used.

Categories: e-infrastructure Tags: ,