# Help my mouse is floating' across the screen!



## krosloniec (Jul 29, 2007)

Please help me I only have one hair left on my head!

I have a couple of Dell laptops that runs Windows XP.
My mouse cursor, without touching or being near the mouse, started 'floating' across the screen. it is hard to click on anything on the screen, because the cursor is drifting at a quick pace. This happens with the touch pad and a USB optical mouse, I can't stop it from moving even with the USB mouse it keeps drifting. It moves both horizontally and vertically, 
Has anyone come across this or have any ideas about what's going on?

Am I looking at a driver problem or some virus? I ran a scan and found nothing. This starts with in a couple of minutes after boot up


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## Alex Ethridge (Apr 10, 2000)

Forget the driver and the virus. It's dirt.

I see this a lot but mostly on Dells. I remove the touchpad (requires disassembly), clean the touchpad and surrounding area and put it back. If that doesn't fix it, you'll need a new touchpad.

That's been my experience.


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## jazz3000 (Apr 19, 2007)

If cleaning it doesn't work you might try going to the device manager and removing the mouse and rebooting to make sure your OS hasn't dropped the ball somewhere. Jazz


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## krosloniec (Jul 29, 2007)

Ok I can understand with the touch pad how that could be dirt, making the cursor float across the screen. What about the USB optical mouse when I plug that in it does the same thing.

With the optical mouse I can grab the cursor and drag it back, but as soon as I let it go it starts floating across the screen again. I try removing the mouse and rebooting first.

Thanks

Ken


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## Alex Ethridge (Apr 10, 2000)

It isn't the optical mouse that's doing it. It is the touchpad. If you will notice, the touchpad still works even when the optical mouse is working also.


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