Windows Vista Annoyance: Sluggish Cursor


Windows Vista: Sluggish Cursor

I woke up this morning, and saw my laptop was on. The Mozilla Firefox browser had crashed. Weird. I sure didn't leave it crashed when I went to bed. Another weird thing was that since I solved my problem of windows vista not waking up from sleep or hibernate I rarely leave my laptop on all night. Strange happens.

PROBLEM

Oh well. Firefox does crash sometimes. It's the newest version 3.5 after all. What really surprised me was that the windows vista cursor (or pointer) was sluggish. It was moving 3-5 times slower than normal. I tried changing pointer sped through Start/Control Panel/Mouse/Settings. No change in speed. I started the Windows Task Manager and noticed that Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe) was page faulting quite a bit (300-400 pagefaults a second) when moving the mouse which is unusual.

Googled

  • vista sluggish cursor
  • vista sluggish pointer
I came up with a lot of people having this problem but no solutions. Even came across some respectable sounding windows vista forums. Came across windows games sites reporting the same problem. Windows news sites. No answers. Weird. Either this is a really tough problem or really simple.

BEFORE YOU JUMP INTO THE SOLUTION HERE, CHECK THIS

[Update: Before you look into this solution, there is a simple one you may want to try instead. It is much faster! Go see Solved: Slow Mouse Pointer on Vista Laptop]

SOLUTION

Well it turns out this problem was one of the simple kind. Sometimes a computer just mysteriously loses the sense of time and the driving frequency. So it needs to be rebooted. Rebooting the laptop in fact solved the problem of sluggish cursor. That was easy!

COMMENTS?

Did you experience a sluggish cursor on your computer, vista or otherwise? How did you solve it? Find a comment button below and let me know! Got any other computer-related problem you'd like to see solved? Just hit the comment button.


UPCOMING RELATED ISSUES

Other issues: As I was working on the sleep and hibernate problems with Windows Vista, I got a glimpse of a possible solution to another related problem some people were reporting in the help forums. They found their Vista laptop woke up during sleep repeatedly and they lost all data and batery power. If you would like to find a solution to that problem let me know and I will investigate further. If the problem is happening with your laptop, please leave me as much information as you can in the comment below. Or, hit "Follow through Google Friend Connect" on the side. Any other problem with your laptop? Let me know in the comment below!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any solutions worth mentioning to stabilize page faults in dwm.exe (desktop windows manager)??

Disclosure said...

Well the above solution did solve the dwm.exe page faults problem also although I never mentioned that. Plus there is a simpler solution above that also stabilized page faults in dwm.exe. So take your pick.

If none of the solutions work, write back with more details about your specific configuration and situation.

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