Suggestions needed, I have a wandering mouse!

[seaglass]

My mouse is barely controllable, it won't stop wandering across my screen.

I have 3 pointer devices on my laptop, a button mouse in the middle of my keyboard, a touch pad below my keyboard and a USB mouse and they are all doing the same thing.

I have already reinstalled the Intellipoint software and that hasn't helped.

I spent 40 minutes on the phone with Dell and finally had to get off without a solution, the only thing they had me do is reinstall the original drivers.

Has anyone had this happen? If yes, how did you fix it?

The worst thing is I learned computers on a DOS machine, when I went to windows I never learned the keyboard shortcuts so I am dependant on this misbehaving mouse.

[freetobegay]

1. First off no sex threads!

"I spent 40 minutes on the phone with Dell and finally had to get off without a solution" sorry couldn't resist!

Is it a ball mouse, a laser light mouse?

[NewHampster]

2. bang it on the table if its a laser

if its a ball clean the poor mouseys ball

[seaglass]

4. I have cleaned the ball but it didn't help. n/t

[cosmicaug]

7. Dirty ball.

A dirty ball wouldn't make your cursor drift in one direction. A dirty ball or rollers will make the mouse cursor hard to control by making it's motion jerky.

[cosmicaug]

3. Can the button mouse be disabled?

Can the button mouse be disabled so that you can try the other two input devices one at a time?

Is the wandering fairly uniform when you're not touching anything?

On edit: Corrected spelling.

[seaglass]

5. I don't know if I can disable the mice that are on my laptop.

I don't remember when I went to control panel seeing any other mouse identified but the USB mouse, I'll check again though.

It seems like I can use the mouse for about an hour before it starts wandering then it might not be easily controlled for another hour. It wanders from right to left but sometimes hides off screen.

I feels like I have to force it to go where I want it to go and sometimes it just glides right by where I want it to stop.

[cosmicaug]

6. Guess.

I would guess it might be a hardware problem. My guess (and it's a guess) is that the most likely suspect would be the button mouse (though I have no idea how button mice work internally, this does resemble the behavior one can sometimes find with joysticks where they sometimes get drifty --sometimes after a little while). From your message, presumably when you unplug the USB mouse you still have this problem which leaves the touchpad and the button mouse as the only remaining possibilities. Is the touchpad built in? If it isn't built in, take it off and see if the problem remains (if so it would leave the button mouse).

Of course, software problems could also cause something like this. For instance, if you had the OS use the wrong kind of mouse it will not be controllable. However, what you describe isn't quite as bad as that so I'm quite sure that's not likely to be the case here (also, the fact that the problem doesn't occur "cold" is somewhat suggestive of a hardware problem --in theory you could deliberately program the input to behave like this or one could have a very bizarre software bug but I'm guessing either option might be highly unlikely).

But yes, if there's some way to disable that button mouse you at least should be able to rule it out or in as a potential cause (and at least retain functional input capability with the other two input peripherals).

[seaglass]

11. The touchpad isn't removal and I couldn't find a way to

disable it or the button on the laptop. I did download updated drivers from Dell - still no luck.

Tomorrow I will clean my keyboard and see if that might be the problem.

Thanks for your help.

[NMDemDist2]

8. new batteries if it's wireless

that's what seems to be the trouble I have with "wayward" meeces

[cosmicaug]

9. Good suggestion.

[NMDemDist2]

10. hubby's first rule of troubleshooting--

do the easy stuff first lol