bouncing cursor

I have a Dell XPS 15 Z laptop with 6 GB of RAM, 4 x 2.53 GHz processors and 500 GB hard drive which is only about half full. The operating system is Windows 7 Pro/ 64. All updates are current. I have Kaspersky anti-virus, malware bytes, & spybot search and destroy. All of which say the computer is clean.

Regularly my cursor starts jumping around the screen for two or three seconds. Even though the computer does not have a hard drive activity light, I think I can hear the hard drive going when this happens. If I wait a few seconds everything settles down and I have perfect cursor control from the touchpad. I've tried plugging in a mouse and I get the same effect, so I don't think it's the pad itself. The Cyprus touchpad drivers are up to date. I defraged the hard drive regularly. This happens in any program on the machine.

I have seldom seen more than half of the Ram used. The processor load is usually 15 to 25%. I can not detect any relationship between what programs or how many are loaded.

Since the computer seem to be needlessly swapping to the hard drive, I've tried increasing the virtual memory to very large values and decreasing it to a minimum. Makes no difference.


Thanks

Larry

Hello Docweathers,

See if a clean boot changes anything.

Troubleshoot Application Conflicts by Performing a Clean Startup

John

I did the clean startup ritual repeatedly and finally got rid of the jumping cursor. I also took the opportunity to stop loading many unnecessary services, which freed up almost a gigabyte of RAM. The whole system seems a bit quicker without all the unnecessary junk.

please don't take my slow response as being unenthusiastic. I'm a little slow on the uptake right now because I had a total right knee two and half weeks ago. (no sympathy solicited.)

thanks Larry

docweathers said:

I did the clean startup ritual repeatedly and finally got rid of the jumping cursor. I also took the opportunity to stop loading many unnecessary services, which freed up almost a gigabyte of RAM. The whole system seems a bit quicker without all the unnecessary junk.

please don't take my slow response as being unenthusiastic. I'm a little slow on the uptake right now because I had a total right knee two and half weeks ago. (no sympathy solicited.)

thanks Larry

Hey Larry,

When you say you did the Clean Boot, repeatedly. I'm assuming you meant you were experimenting with which Startups or Services to leave active. For Startup entries, just Google each one your not sure of. This way you will know whether or not it should be left active or can be turned off and manually ran when needed.

No problem with it taking a couple or days or so to respond.

John

yes that is what I did until I thought I found the offending service. The problem was seem to be gone for a while that we show up again. In the last analysis though, the real problem was is an add-in for Firefox.

learning to use the MSconfig.exe also let me dump a lot of junk that was just taking up memory and process ticks.

Thanks for your help

larry