Mouse freezing when opening certain programs.

[ariadne2]

well, the title explains it. I have noticed this happening over the last couple of weeks. It happens consistently when I open Spotify and iTunes. Other programs open fine. After a freeze of 5 seconds or so the program opens normally and the mouse unsticks.

My specs:

Case AeroCool DS Cube White Edition Window Mini-ITX
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-4790 (3.6GHz) 8MB Cache
Motherboard ASUS® H81I-PLUS: Mini-ITX, LG1150, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs
Memory (RAM) 16GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card 3GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 780 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready
1st Hard Disk: 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 540MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk 1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1003FZEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 8x BLU-RAY ROM DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW
Power Supply CORSAIR 650W VS SERIES™ VS-650 POWER SUPPLY
Processor Cooling CoolerMaster Seidon 120M High Performance CPU Cooler
Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence
Warranty 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)

 

[steaky360]

Could it be related to programs which need to connect to the internet? How are you connected to the web? Via Ethernet of wireless?

 

[ariadne2]

I'm connected via Ethernet, I don't have a wireless card at all.

 

[ubuysa]

I can think of two possibilities here:

1. (The most likely) is a faulty/wrong/improperly installed mouse driver. If you're using the default driver in Windows to run a gaming mouse this may well be your problem. Whatever mouse you have check the manufacturer's website to see whether there is an updated driver for it and install that. It's possible that the installation of some other device or software has damaged your mouse driver perhaps?

2. The other possibility is resource shortage (so the mouse code has to wait to be executed). Given the spec of your PC I seriously doubt that's the problem - but it still could be. Open the Windows performance monitor (Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Performance Monitor) and create a new User Defined data collector set to monitor system performance and then start it. Then do whatever causes your mouse to stutter and afterwards stop the data collector. Then open the performance monitor results and you'll see graphical data of the resource usage during that run.

Using the performance monitor is pretty straight-forward and you should be able to figure it out, you can even just start one of the system defined data collectors if you want. As I said, I doubt it's resource starvation but hard data is always better than guesswork.