Mouse Hesitation/Freeze

HI Mark,

Is this a wireless mouse using Bluetooth? If so, check battery levels using System Preferences/Keyboard & Mouse/Bluetooth. The battery levels indicator is in the that window.

You indicated you changed to a different mouse without any improvement but we need to know what type of Mouse... Is this a Mighty Mouse? Or standard keyboard and mouse that came with our Mac?

Thanks...
Carolyn 🙂

HI Mark,

Have you checked your System Preferences/Keyboard & Mouse to see if your Key Repeat Rate and Delay Until Repeat are set properly to your liking?

Do you by chance use a graphics tablet with a graphire pen connected with USB? Sometimes those preferences can corrupted mice preferences.

I'm inclined to think this is a system problem, not hardware, meaning mice. Have you checked your Sys Pref Sleep options? System Preferences/Energy Saver/Sleep. If your Mac is "sleeping"... it will cause that slight delay. And if your have the "Put the Hard Disk to Sleep when possible button checked" .. that could be a culprit also. Of course, without using that you are reducing the life of the hardd drive.

The only other suggestion at this point I can think of is to take the Mac/Mice in and have it all checked out. Hopefully you have either an Apple store or a nearby reseller close by. The only other thing that might help is Erasing and Reinstalling the system using your restore disks... but that's a last resort in my opinion.

Wish I could be of more help... it's frustrating to not be able to wave a magic wand in a case like this and "fix it" ...

Carolyn 🙂

" Of course, without using that you are reducing the life of the hardd drive"

" Of course"? Carolyn, whoever told you that was giving you an opinion without a shred of evidence to back it up. The pros and cons of sleeping/spinning down drives have been argued for as long as drives have existed to no useful purpose – it boils down to personal belief/prejudice/knowledge. I myself have had several drives in use at all times for 30 years (yeah, 30), have NEVER allowed an attached drive to spin down, and wouldn't dream of doing differently.

Even so I wouldn't categorically tell someone else to do as I do! 🙂 At most I would explain to them why I do as I do, e.g. that mechanical devices suffer most from "stop/start"… and there are several other valid reasons.

I have an iMac PowerPC G4 with OS X 10.4.9. The mouse pointer freezes or spastically hesitates as if Spotlight is temporarily capturing the data or as if I don't have enough RAM (768MB) to accommodate the additional background processing. I used to see this when the earlier versions of MS Office were archiving the documents as I was working on them.

This seems to be an operating system issue since all three of my systems are now experiencing the same problem and it didn't happen until at least the 10.4.7 or 10.4.8 versions.

If I unplug the mouse, the pointer is released, but it is always happening. Any ideas?

Hi Mark,

<<standard oval, clear apple Pro mouse, the other a smaller Macally optical mouse with scroll wheel>>

I don't suppose these mice came with drivers? That had to be installed in order to use the mice? If so, reinstall the drivers.

Also, go to /Library/Preferences and see if you can locate a file that is similiar to this; com.applepromouse.plist if so, send it to the Trash. Your Mac will create a new preference (.plist) file for you.

I'm still checking forums for anything related to this problem.

Carolyn 🙂

Well, we've exhausted the usual troubleshooting ideas... how about trying a new mouse? I absolutely love the wireless technology pairing with Bluetooth.......... you might want to give it a try.

Carolyn 🙂

I have developed exactly the same mouse freezing/ hesitating problem on my Cube. But mine appears to be affecting everything USB on my Mac. It is almost like the signal from my USB devices hiccups. It is driving me crazy--messing up my printing, my USB card reader, etc. I have replaced the USB hub twice and nothing changes. If anyone has any suggestions...thanks.

G4 Cube 450MHz Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Hi All-

I think I have finally figured out the hesitation problem. I turn off my computer every night so I don't get the automatic updating and cleaning of my software that the OS X 10.4 Tiger does for us in the middle of the night.

If you go to http://software-robotics.com/docs/PDF-X-RobotOS_XMaintenance.html and read about running Terminal with the following scripts: sudo periodic daily , sudo periodic weekly and sudo periodic monthly , you may find that the problem is significantly diminished as I did.

Best of luck.

A-

Finally, finally my mouse hesitation problem on my G4 iMac really has been solved. I thought it was "Spotlight" keeping track of changes, or insufficient RAM (768 MB) or Iomega backup automatically tracking changes, or "Mail" getting messages, or from my last post, not running clean-up scripts, but it was an insipient MOUSE FAILURE. Swapping the mouse with another iMac solved the problem.

Good luck to the rest of you with this.