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Major mouse issues in Lion

After installing Lion, I'm having very bizarre mouse behavior. Basically the cursor randomly shoots across the screen or disappears and re-appears in the corner. It's a huge hassle. I thought my mouse was going bad, but I boot into Windows and it's just fine, business as usual.

I found several threads on other forums with people describing the same issue after installing Lion, with all kinds of different mice. So this is not unique to my system by any means. Personally I use a Targus Bluetooth Mouse for Mac, as I have for three years. It's a great mouse and I love it, as it has lots of buttons and a round touchpad area in the middle. It works for scrolling all directions and has always worked like a charm. However, with this mouse in Launchpad also when I try to side scroll, it only goes right. I swipe the mouse's scroll conrol the the left, it scrolls right. Any sideways scrolling just goes to the right. However it scrolls properly everywhere else (finder, iTunes, Safari, etc).


While that issue may be unique to this particular model of mouse, the wild flitting about of the cursor is again being widely reported in other forums, but I'm not seeing anything here about it. One fellow at MacRumors said an Apple engineer has requested various logs about it and is working on the problem. I hope that's true because this is pretty awful so far, making it very difficult to use the computer.

MBP 2.8 i7, Mac OS X (10.7), iPod Touch 2nd Gen

Posted on Jul 23, 2011 1:38 AM

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149 replies

Jul 19, 2012 8:19 AM in response to Hiyouall

Sorry to the other guy, but it is an OSX issue. I have 2 magic mouses, one for a macbook pro and for my imac. I resisted installing Lion on my imac for as long as possible, so I just installed it a few days ago when mobile me went dead. I have been working with the magic mouse for years in the same mac and configuration. after installing LION I started having mouse troubles.


I thought it was the mouse, so I exchanged the mice from each computer and the report is: both mice work fine in the mackbook pro, and both mice misbehave on the imac. It is impossible to use photoshop with the mouse, there is no precision at all. Do we have to start suing Apple for lost work to be heard??? Apple flat out ignores a trend that has been on since OS X 10.7.1, now I am using OS X 10.7.4 almost a year later from the original post and the issue persists.


After reading the trends, I notice that my problem in the macbook pro is not the mouse, but the trackpad, since I use the mouse most of the time I had not noticed, but my trackpad is terrible on the macbook, to drag anything is a chore. How can anyone be expected to use the computer with such a basic and imperative function not working?


The more I use Lion, the more flaws I find, no wonder they will kill it after just one year. No pointing device precision... it is a shame to even read about it, Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave guys.

Jul 28, 2012 11:49 AM in response to Alexandre Vale

hey thanks alexandre. your observation about the trackpad connection helped a lot. i went to the trackpad setup and unchecked every available checkbox - all the multi-finger and swipes use. without even a reboot, my microsoft wireless mouse really steadied down. rather ironically, when i signed up to this list to say thankyou, the login menus presented the jumpy behavior in extreme, but then settled down to useable for this reply.


so you must be onto something about the osx coding for the interface of trackpad and mouse.


some additional data. i've used trackballs for 20 years and far prefer them to mice or pads. when logitech came out a year ago with a wireless one, i immediately bought it. i have to buy another because i wore out the main button which as it developed the "switch bounce" of normal wear, became too much for the logitech software. but after upgrading to lion the cursor jumping became evident on that too. and as the threads tell, a reset helps, and an unplug replug of the wireless dongle helps.


i think you're onto something here though with the focus on the lion finger interface, and not a particular mouse.

Oct 14, 2012 3:06 PM in response to Kevenly

MY SOLUTION: I read many suggested solutions but, for me, the fix was resetting the PRAM (restart your machine while holding down Option-Command-P-R and waiting for it to chime again).


My symptoms were: cursor jumping in a random direction while mouse was in use and when connected to an external monitor. If I tried to quickly draw a 1" circle over and over, the cursor would jump to a random location approximately 5" away about every 7 seconds.


So my suggestion is to try zapping your PRAM. It only takes a minute or two to try it and it might solve your problem. Good luck.

Nov 20, 2012 7:44 AM in response to Kevenly

I have a Mac Pro 2007 (2,1) at work. Recently I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion (10.7.5) which is the last supported OSX for this model. After updating is finished, jumpy mouse symptom appears. I tried deleted all the preference filies but it did not work. To make long story short, it's the video board that caused the problem.


About a year ago I upgraded my video card to ATI Radeon HD 5770 Graphic Card. It works fine on Snow Leopard but not on Lion. On Lion, not only it causes jumpy mouse but also screen flickering on second monitor every few minutes or so.


So I removed the card and put back the original OEM video card that came with it. The jumpy mouse stops completely and everything is back to normal.

Jan 15, 2013 4:41 AM in response to Kevenly

This happens every so often with my wife's 24 inch iMac (2006?) and her Wacom Cintiq 24inch tablet which is attached as the second display. The Cintiq is placed below the iMac and the cursor goes crazy in the bottom right corner of the Cintiq.


SOLUTION: The simple solution is to turn off the Cintiq. Then turn it on again, the problem goes away.


Still don't know the long term solution but it doesn't happen very often and this solution works.


Other info: The OS is Lion, I should update it.


Message was edited by: David from Sydney

Feb 17, 2013 1:05 PM in response to Kevenly

ik heb dit probleem nu ook. (apple mouse bedraad)

het werken op deze mac is schier onmogelijk.

heb deze mac met lion gekocht en een timemachine backup van snow-leopard er overheen gezet.

vr: moet ik een totaal restore doen of heeft iemand oplossing?

sorry voor mijn engels maar ik woon in nederland



<offtopic>

safari crasht op deze machine zeker 5 keer per dag met send reports en heb nog nooit iets van vernomen

</offtopic>

Major mouse issues in Lion

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