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Unresponsive Mouse on Air in Snow Leopard

W

will

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 29, 2002
179
0
I'm lucky enough to have a current gen 13" MacBook Air as my work computer. It's been working great until a couple of weeks ago when the mouse started to be really unresponsive. The best way I can describe it is it acts like it were drunk; lagging behind my movements.

I experience this both with a wireless Logitech and a wired MS mouse. Yet the trackpad is fine and responsive. The same Logitech mouse works fine on my home Mac (2.4GHz Santa Rosa MBP). Both my home and office Macs are running 10.6.6.

I have tried rebooting and resetting the SMC to no avail. Some previous reports of mouse issues mentioned disabling Airport. This doesn't seem to resolve the issue for me. I've also tried to think of any software I might have installed, but nothing major has been added recently and I tried disabling the antivirus, but this didn't help either.

Any ideas? It's driving me crazy.

Thanks,
Will
 
will said:
I'm lucky enough to have a current gen 13" MacBook Air as my work computer. It's been working great until a couple of weeks ago when the mouse started to be really unresponsive. The best way I can describe it is it acts like it were drunk; lagging behind my movements.

I experience this both with a wireless Logitech and a wired MS mouse. Yet the trackpad is fine and responsive. The same Logitech mouse works fine on my home Mac (2.4GHz Santa Rosa MBP). Both my home and office Macs are running 10.6.6.

I have tried rebooting and resetting the SMC to no avail. Some previous reports of mouse issues mentioned disabling Airport. This doesn't seem to resolve the issue for me. I've also tried to think of any software I might have installed, but nothing major has been added recently and I tried disabling the antivirus, but this didn't help either.

Any ideas? It's driving me crazy.

Thanks,
Will
Click to expand...

Every now and then I notice erratic mouse movement mostly when my Macbook is real busy. Did you install some software within the last few weeks that added some bloated pig to your login items? You can go to system preferences -> login items and see if there is anything there you don't need. Another cause of this symptom is spotlight. It sometimes falls behind indexing if you copy a few dozen gigs of new data onto your Mac. This is something that settles down quickly enough and I don't recommend disabling spotlight. For me it is one of the reasons I like OS X so much.

On windows, when my PC gets bogged down, it's pretty easy to find the culprit in "task manager". On OS X not so much. There have been very few times a task has grown out of proportion and I've decided to close or force quit it but that's something you can check. Go to the Apple logo and pick force quit to see if the OS thinks any app is out to lunch.

The fact that the trackpad works when the mouse does not could mean it has a more reliable path back to the OS. Any external mouse goes through bluetooth or USB while the trackpad probably is wired internally using USB, it may be "closer" to the CPU than any external device would be. This is why I'm suggesting you look at bloated software pigs for a solution to your problem. Speaking of bloated software pigs, what are you doing running Anti Virus on a Mac? Are you trying to protect your windows-using friends from viruses you might inadvertently pass along? Antivirus software is something you might consider uninstalling, especially if you installed it around the time you started having this problem.

hope this helps...
 
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