[esjay]

Hi All. I hope someone can help me. My mouse has begun to behave erratically, lagging and eventually freezing up completely. Shutting down the computer unfreezes the mouse temporarily but then, within minutes, it goes right back to it again. I have XP, 1.8 Ghz, 992 MB RAM. I've tried another mouse and the same thing happens so it's not the mouse. The one I'm using is a Microsoft Optical USB mouse. I've run a virus scan and came up with nothing. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the mouse--actually just letting the computer find and reinstall. Still behaving the same. One weird thing, when it freezes, often picking it up from the mouse pad or sometimes turning it over frees it again. Another weird thing--this happened once before but it resolved itself. Both times my husband had been using Photoshop Elements just before it started. Help please!

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It's possible that you may have either a hard ware problem, quite possibly ram, or you could have an infection. Since the hardware problem is a little faster to investigate, let's explore that first.
When the mouse freezes, are you able to use the keyboard? Easiest way to check this is to hit the windows key, this is typically down between the 'ctrl' and 'alt' key on the left of the space bar. If you hit this button and the start menu comes up, then we know it's not the complete system locking up. But if you hit it and nothing happens, we know you are complete locked.
Now we will need to know your hard drive type in order for me to tell you what diagnostics to run and where to get it.
If you will go into device manager and look at the hard drives and tell me what it says I will tell you where to go to get the correct diagnostics software for checking your hard drive.
Also you should test the ram, I recommend using two different testing software for this. First is Windows Memory tester, you can download that from here: http://oca.microsoft.../en/windiag.asp
The second one is memtest, you can get that from here: http://www.memtest.org/
Run both of these at least 3 passes.

[Cotutor]

It's possible that you may have either a hard ware problem, quite possibly ram, or you could have an infection. Since the hardware problem is a little faster to investigate, let's explore that first.
When the mouse freezes, are you able to use the keyboard? Easiest way to check this is to hit the windows key, this is typically down between the 'ctrl' and 'alt' key on the left of the space bar. If you hit this button and the start menu comes up, then we know it's not the complete system locking up. But if you hit it and nothing happens, we know you are complete locked.
Now we will need to know your hard drive type in order for me to tell you what diagnostics to run and where to get it.
If you will go into device manager and look at the hard drives and tell me what it says I will tell you where to go to get the correct diagnostics software for checking your hard drive.
Also you should test the ram, I recommend using two different testing software for this. First is Windows Memory tester, you can download that from here: http://oca.microsoft.../en/windiag.asp
The second one is memtest, you can get that from here: http://www.memtest.org/
Run both of these at least 3 passes.

[esjay]

Hi. Well, it resolved itself. I had tested my mouse by taking it over to a friend's computer and trying it out. And it worked. Which told me that it must be something other than the mouse that was the problem, right? WRONG! For some reason it worked that time. Go figure!

Yesterday, in desperation, I borrowed the mouse from that other computer and tried it. It worked here! And has continued to work. So it's an easy fix, it turns out. Replace the mouse.

Sorry to have bothered you all. Thank you for your time.

Geeks to Go rule!

Sherry