Booted up my computer today, and the mouse didn’t work at all. Didn’t matter where I plugged it in. Restarting did nothing.
Okay, I think, I must have a dead mouse.
Plugged in my son’s brand-new USB mouse. The pointer moved across the screen just fine. Problem is, it wouldn’t engage with anything when you clicked on it. So the mouse half worked? What kind of tech problem is this?
Plugged in USB mouse again, it has full functionality, but it lost full functionality temporarily and then regained it again. It seems to be going back and forth between working and not working.
Both of these mouses worked perfectly well last night.
I don’t even know where to start with this. What gives?
Edit: It now won’t launch anything from the menu bar, but it will launch items from the desktop. It’s like the task bar is frozen. I launched a game called Wordplay and it works in game.
Do you have a different USB port you can plug the mouse into? Sometimes an internal connection may get loose. If it works on a different USB port, then you’ve narrowed down the problem.
Go to “Control Panel” and choose “Device Manager”. Scroll until you find “Mice and other pointing devices”. Open the drop down, and you should see “HID compliant mouse”. Right click it and uninstall it and be sure to uninstall the driver, also.
Restart, and the computer will detect the mouse and automatically re-install it with the correct driver. That may solve the problem.
*Plug in mouse.
*Use keyboard> control+alt+delete. This brings up the Win ‘security intention’ screen.
*Press Escape to return to the prior Window & test the mouse.
This, among other things, clears the keyboard and mouse buffers.
Just to add an anecdote. A few months ago when I finally enabled my new Win11 laptop, I plugged a mouse into it that had come with some other computer and never been used. It performed erratically somewhat like described in the OP.
I have other mousies but they’re plugged into desktop computers and I can’t be arsed to unplug them to test with the new laptop, so instead I fired up an old laptop and tried that same mouse. The behaviour was completely different, but it was still not fully working.
I ordered a new Logitech mouse from Amazon, plugged it in to the new laptop, and it worked perfectly. The other mouse was summarily relegated to the garbage.
Looking at it now, appears to be two different issues.
Update finally broke my old mouse
Update messed with the drivers of my son’s USB mouse
The new one I got is a cheap wireless gaming mouse (those things run up to $180!) I couldn’t justify paying that much when I’m hardly doing high-performance gaming these days. This one’s made by a company called Redragon that I’ve never heard of but it had rave reviews. $30 So far, works great.
So far, works great.