It would happen sometimes that when using my work mobile computer, the mouse cursor would go absolutely wild at first, making it very difficult to control. This would often happen when I was trying to work on the train, early in the morning. I discovered that if I left the mouse to its own, it would calm down after a few minutes. At one stage this got so bad that I was sorely tempted to ask for a replacement computer. This happened some times but not every time.
Yesterday, I was randomly perusing the blog of Microsoft explainer in chief, Raymond Chen, when I came across a very old entry about how a computer mouse could sometimes lock up a computer. The moral of the story was not to connect a mouse to a running computer, especially a mobile computer, which has its own kind of mouse buttons as well as a track ball (that blue thing in the keyboard, sandwiched between g, h and b).
I realised that this described the problem which I was having with the mobile computer: if I connected the mouse to the computer before I turned it on, everything would be ok. The mouse would go wild if I connected it after the computer had already started running. As Raymond writes in one of the comments in that blog, the "wandering mouse-stick" is the stick recalibrating itself. If you
touch the stick while it is recalibrating you are only making it worse.
Just let it wander for a few seconds until it gets its bearings.
So now I know: connect the mouse before turning the computer on. This is a problem only on my work mobile, as I frequently turn it on and off; all my other computers stay on all the time.
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