Windows 7 Mousey, mousey . . . splat

[TonyE]

Mouse requires many tries and much persuading to highlight words or string of text, or not inadvertently do what I don't want done - don't want to rearrange text for instance. For instance, try to highlight a word within text. It may highlight whole line of text, of may not leave highlighting intact when pointer moved away to take desired action, eg 'copy'. So I have to repeat my action, maybe more than once.
Pointer overly sensitive and unreliable. I am always 'undoing' stuff because of the dicky pointer or trying same little action ten times before it 'sticks'.
Any solutions that don't include harming myself?

 

[badrobot]

What kind of mouse do you have? It's important that we know if it is a generic wired mouse of a special mouse that requires a specific driver to work properly.

I have a logitech mouse that acts weird if I use the generic driver that comes with the OS. It turns the volume up and zoom in and out by itself. After installing the specific driver for it, everything is fine.

 

[TonyE]

Badrobot - it is the wire-attached mouse that came with this Gateway computer. Had the computer about 2 years and the mouse function has only degenerated over the last month or two.

 

[badrobot]

Badrobot - it is the wire-attached mouse that came with this Gateway computer. Had the computer about 2 years and the mouse function has only degenerated over the last month or two.

Ok. But before you spend a lot of energy trying to fix it, you may want to try on another mouse if there's another one available so you know it's not just the mouse acting up. You don't wanna waste a lot of time figuring out what the problem is only to find out that it's time to change the mouse.

If there's no available mouse that you can borrow, you can start by making sure that there is no source of interference like phone charger cable close by, etc.



Cheers!

 

[Fixer1234]

Mouse requires many tries and much persuading to highlight words or string of text, or not inadvertently do what I don't want done - don't want to rearrange text for instance. For instance, try to highlight a word within text. It may highlight whole line of text, of may not leave highlighting intact when pointer moved away to take desired action, eg 'copy'. So I have to repeat my action, maybe more than once.
Pointer overly sensitive and unreliable. I am always 'undoing' stuff because of the dicky pointer or trying same little action ten times before it 'sticks'.
Any solutions that don't include harming myself?

Another possibility: there could be something slowing the response of your computer. If this is the cause of your problem, you would see other symptoms of slow speed or delayed response, like web sites loading slowly and processes taking an unusually long time. If you look at the Performance tab in Task Manager, CPU usage would be very high (close to 100%), or memory usage would be close to 100% and if you click on Resource Monitor, you would probably see an extreme amount of disk activity. If this is the case, you could see the kinds of symptoms you describe because a delayed response by the computer causes the interpreted mouse results to be out of sync with your actions. There are numerous possible causes of maxed-out resources. If you are not seeing such symptoms, only mouse problems, this is not likely the explanation.

If the problem is not the one described above, the most likely cause is a bad mouse.

 

[seekermeister]

The symptoms described sound similar to ones I've experienced with one of my mice. I've determined that it is caused by the left and/or right button wear and tear. Sometimes it will click multiple times for one press of the button, far, far faster than anyone could do if they wanted to. Other times it takes multiple clicks to register only one. Since the problem has to do with the mechanical aspect within the mouse, it wouldn't matter if the mouse were corded or cordless. A mouse doesn't have to be ancient for the problem to develop, because I have one that is only a few months old which is doing this. The best approach is to simply get a new mouse, because they aren't expensive.

 

[TonyE]

That sound like what I'm seeing. Erratic would be a good description of it's behaviour. A common feature of the fault is the highlighting of a word or phrase won't 'take' , and as to be tried several times. Also, before I could pull a full screen down to find what was hidden beneath. It won't work now, I have to 'minimise' first.
I'll get a new mouse I think. Thanks for all the input.