Mouse cursor jumping around

About a month ago my mouse cursor started moving across the screen, jumping around when I moved it, and sometimes just goes wild. It is a basic logitech optical mouse with a USB cable. I thought it might be that my mouse pad was dirty and maybe had some reflective particals that were causing these symptoms. I changed out the mouse pad and still have the problem. Now when I slowly move my cursor in any direction, it starts jumping back a few millimeters and then jumps back in the direction I'm moving it. It is obviously the mouse itself that is at fault, but is it fixable? I was thinking that the optics had moved up a little within the housing of the mouse, thus moving it further from the mouse pad. Maybe the optics or somthing on the board is going bad.... Logitech doesn't make my mouse anymore and I am reluctant to go on a search for a different model. Does anyone know what is going on here?

 

Firstly welcome to MG.

The first thing I would try is re-installing the mouse driver. Go to the device manager and find your mouse. Select it and then delete it. Reboot the PC whereupon the mouse should be re-detected. It may need you to install any specific mouse driver software at this point. See if that helps.

 

That would have never come to mind because all of my thoughts point to hardware. I did it anyways and for a little while it seemed to have worked. It is now happening just as it was before. I think it might have been a coincidence that it was acting ok after I removed the driver. I have two mice listed in the Device Manager by the way:

"
HID-compliant mouse
PS/2 Compatible Mouse
"

I removed the "HID-compliant mouse" in the Device Manager and my mouse stopped working. After rebooting it came back and the mouse was responding again. Next I removed the "PS/2 Compatible Mouse" and my mouse still responded....a little extra info in the event that it might help.

 

The fact that it worked for a while after having removed the driver makes me think that the driver itself may be corrupt.

Have a read of this too. Let us know if the information there helps.

You can also download a new driver from here.