Is the cursor blinking intensely and the PC is slow? How to fix it

You are working, playing a game or doing another activity and suddenly you see how the cursor starts blinking so fast that it becomes almost invisible. The screen refresh rate can’t keep up with the mouse and everything that happens on your PC starts to slow down. Both the processor and the graphics go to 100% and you end up getting desperate. Have I bought a computer chestnut? It’s failing on the inside.

Why does the mouse cursor flicker and everything slows down?

We must start from the fact that regardless of whether you are playing a video game or editing, for example, an image in Photoshop, a sensation of movement must be created. The rule is that for each movement we make with the mouse or by pressing a key, the result is reflected in the form of a new frame or a succession of them. The fact is that the refresh rate of the mouse, with which its sensor interprets the movements we make with it, is much higher than that of a screen.

Today a pointer can work at a speed of 1 ms, that is, 1000 Hz, but obviously there are no screens at that speed, so when moving our pointer. Each frame represents several readings of the same. How often? Well that will depend on the mouse driver. Which is one of the generic drivers for USB ports. The fact is that when the cursor blinks very intensely, what exists is a coordination problem between the mouse driver and the graphics card driver.

The slowdown? It comes for the same problem, the refresh rate of the mouse and the screen have been equalized. That is, it is asking the CPU to generate the screen list of 1000 frames in one second. This supposes a huge work overload that ends up saturating the system due to such nonsense.

Is it a hardware problem?

Don’t worry, your PC isn’t slow and you don’t have a serious hardware problem either, but as we mentioned before it’s a mouse driver problem. Unfortunately, this is one of the generic Windows drivers and this is so that when you connect any of these devices you can use it directly. However, these are totally “dumb” in the sense that to interpret what the sensor of the mouse itself captures, it is the PC itself that interprets the data in order to present the movement of the cursor on the screen.

How to solve it?

So you will have to update the driver or see if it works well, for this you just have to follow the conventional procedure for these cases:

1. Press the Windows and X keys at the same time and from the conceptual menu that appears, select Device Manager.
2. Within the device manager window itself, those that have the ability to move the on-screen pointer, i.e. conventional mice and trackpads, are found under the Mouse and other pointing devices category.
   1. We recommend that if you use a laptop with a Bluetooth or USB mouse that you disable the trackpad on it . If it appears in the form of a repeated name, simply disconnect the rest of the pointers and select disable device by right clicking with the mouse. Do not uninstall it , as that will cause it to detect it and reinstall it again with the next reboot or after a short time.
   2. Leave only one mouse on your system to avoid conflicting readings that can lead to mouse flicker. That is, use only one, it does not matter if you prefer a trackpad or a conventional mouse.
   3. If it is a specific brand mouse, use the manufacturer’s driver and not the generic one. You should find it on the website of the same without problems, if the Windows repository is not able to find it.

Do not forget to keep the graphics card drivers up to date, as we remember that they are generally the other culprit of the problem. The process is the same as for updating the mouse driver. Although in this case you should go to the manufacturer’s website to obtain them. In the event that you see that the problem persists, change the mouse.