My mouse is unresponsive in the morning

I have a Windows 10 desktop, less than 6 months old. I turn it off only once a week, and keep it on the rest of the time. Each morning I come to my desk to start doing whatever on the pc, but there’s no mouse pointer on the screen. Or the pointer is on the screen but it won’t move. Or I move the mouse, and the pointer vanishes, and reappears 5-15 seconds later in some unknown region of the screen. Or I get tired of looking for the pointer, so I right-click in hopes that the context menu will show me where the pointer is, and maybe it will and maybe it won’t.

This crap continues for 10 minutes or so, until the pc has finally woken up, and functions normally for the rest of the day. Additional info: This seems to affect only the mouse and not the keyboard; the keyboard seems fully functional, except that is worthless unless I happened to leave a Word document open last night and now I want to continue typing, which is almost never the case. It also seems to happen only in the morning, and not when the pc has been unused in the middle of the day.

It’s a wireless mouse, but switching the battery doesn’t help, and the wireless keyboard is on the same connection, so I don’t think that’s the cause. (If I had a wired mouse I would certainly try that but I seems I’ve discarded all my old mice.)

I sometimes get the feeling that the pc has been hijacked by some kind of malware, and the CPU is so busy on that other stuff that it can’t be bothered to respond to my mouse movements; but then after a few minutes it finally reprioritizes stuff and acts normal. But all my virus scans come up okay, and wouldn’t such malware bother me midday also?

Any ideas or suggestions? Thanks!

This is a (kind of) common issue with W10. The system prioritizes getting a network connection above everything, so until it has that other wireless connections are marginalized.
If your router / modem / whatever is set to connect on demand - which means it goes to sleep too - until it wakes up and does its job there will be serious lag in wireless communication.

I’ve never seen or heard of this before. The wireless connection (non-Bluetooth) is between the dongle and the device at the hardware level. Windows has nothing to do with it, Windows sees it as an HID device, the same as a wired mouse.

You said it’s a desktop, but do you also have a mouse pad as well?

My wireless mouse for my laptop (which has a mouse pad built into the keyboard) is funky sometimes (also win10). I often have to left click to get it to respond.

In my case I think it’s just a matter of changing control, or waking up mouse input.

Based on the thread title, I was going to suggest coffee, or perhaps letting the cat loose, or maybe just poking it with a stick.

But, I guess that wouldn’t actually help solve your problem.

Yeah, I was reminded of a girl at Walmart buying cedar shavings for her pet mouse.
She caught a wild mouse in a glue trap and freed it using nail polish remover, keeping it as a pet.
I don’t think she knew the danger.

Thanks for the comments. I’m going to get a wired mouse just to see if it helps.

FWIW, I use two Windows 10 machines. One is on a WiFi network, wireless mouse works fine. The other has no type of network connection. I had a matched pair of wireless mouse and keyboard on that one, everything worked fine for a few days and then the mouse stopped working but the keyboard didn’t. I had a spare wireless mouse with a separate WiFi dongle, plugged that in, the mouse worked for a few days, then stopped. I had to switch to a wired mouse. The wireless keyboard still works. The wireless mouses continue to work on the other machine.

I’ve had this sort of quirk, after waking up my laptop, no mouse, or very slow scrolling. W$10 seems to do funky things with the mouse drivers, reverting back to generic or something like that. Try manually updating with the latest drivers from the mouse support, it may work. I used to be able to recuperate usage by unplugging/ plugging in the dongle, is this your case?
I haven’t had the problem since I installed the new Logitech Options, about six months ago, but I am not 100% sure that the solution came from that.

For myself, unplugging/replugging the dongle doesn’t help, uninstalling/reinstalling the driver doesn’t help. After that, I gave up on trying to fix it and went with the wired mouse, just accepting that it is one of the many, many ways Windows 10 is inferior Windows XP.

I was going to say --“apply more Cheese.”

Is your PC set to go to sleep after X hours ? The wake-up is so instantaneous these days that you may not be aware of it – except for that mouse problem. If it’s set to sleep, can you try disabling that feature ?

If your wireless mouse is a Logitech, I know that Logitech uses a special dongle (the “Unifying Receiver”) that can handle multiple Logitech-branded devices at a time. So in that context there’s a second level of plug-and-play between the dongle and the device(s). I’ve had problems when waking it up from sleep or returning from a KVM switch. Turning the mouse off and on (using the button underneath) may help with detection.

Yes indeed, the pc was set to sleep after 5 hours. It is now set to Never. In the morning, I’ll see if that makes a difference.

If it is still wonky, I’ll remove and reattach the dongle - yes, it’s a Logitech.

Thanks for all the ideas! See ya’ll in 8-9 hours or so!

Don’t try to wake it up by giving it Monster Energy Drink or Red Bull.

This seems to have disappeared after buying a new mouse (logitech Mx anywhere 25) and thus switching to the new “Logitech Options” software (instead of the “Unifying”), I don’t remember if my Razr mouse had this sort of bug, but that was under 8.1.

Wow! The mouse is working totally normally. I guess the sleep setting was the culprit. Thanks, everyone!

You can try looking at your computer settings and your Windows settings, to see of you can enable wake-on-mouse. If it’s just the mouse that is taking a long time to wake up, leaving it enabled may fix the problem, while allowing the rest of the computer to sleep.

If you want the computer to be able to sleep (it’s a significant power savings), maybe just unplug and replug the Logitech receiver every morning?