Mouse cursor troubleshooting

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

Sorry, keyboard secrets will have to wait. No time. But here’s something else.

Case of the disappearing cursor. Maybe you’re lucky and you’ve never seen this, but sometimes the cursor will disappear inside text boxes in Windows NT (and presumably 9x). The solution is to reinstall your video driver — preferably a newer version.

I’ll be back in a bit. I’ve got some cool hotkey tricks. You don’t have to buy a new Microsoft keyboard to have keyboard access to things like the My Computer icon. For that matter you don’t have to buy a new keyboard to get a Windows key either, if you’re an old-timer like me still using an old 101-key PS/2 keyboard (the keyboards of today just aren’t nearly as good as the ones IBM and Lexmark made 12 or 13 years ago–of course, they also cost 10% of what those keyboards cost new).

I’ll spill the beans later this morning.

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2 thoughts on “Mouse cursor troubleshooting

  • May 1, 2003 at 5:58 pm
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    Dear Sir,

    When starting my Emachine 566i2, neither the mouse or Key board will work, although the computer boots up.
    I’ve checked and double checked all my connections.
    This machine has been disconnected for 2 months, hard to see why that would affect it. Can you advise please ?

  • May 1, 2003 at 10:08 pm
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    The most common cause of that is having the keyboard and mouse reversed. You’ve probably already tried that, but if not, try reversing them and see what happens. But before you do that, check your plugs and make sure you don’t have any bent pins. That’s the second most-common cause of stuff like that. You usually can straighten the pins with a very fine set of needle-nose pliers but be careful. It’s easy to snap a pin off.

    Failing either of those, have you tried your keyboard and mouse on a friend’s computer, or tried another keyboard and mouse on yours? Keyboards and mice can go bad, though it is rare for them to go bad just sitting. If another keyboard/mouse set doesn’t work, my guess is the ports got zapped with static electricity when connecting or disconnecting them (that’s really rare though). Unfortunately, that’s an expensive repair (motherboard replacement, figure $100-$150 once you cover labor). If that’s the case, you could get a keyboard and mouse that plug into the USB ports and probably the rest of the computer is OK.

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