Windows 10/11 mouse freezing unresponsive and erratic movement delays
How to fix the erratic freezing delays in mouse movement in Windows.
I have been trying to fix the erratic and delayed movement of the mouse in my Dell Precision i7 32GB RAM high end laptop for a long time without success. The mouse would freeze, mouse cursor disappear, slow or no cursor movement, and overall non-smooth mouse movement. Until I found out the cause was nVidia GPU overload and was able to fix it.
The symptoms were when you go to your task bar right click and open the Task Manger under the GPU column it would keep changing rapidly from 10% to 80% GPU usage randomly. Whenever GPU % reached above 50% my mouse would slow down and become unresponsive. This was fixed by preventing most apps from using the GPU unnecessarily so the mouse would get priority.
How to fix it:
UPDATE: Finally was able to fix mouse erratic slow movement by unchecking the option under Windows 10 Mouse Properties->Pointer Options->Display pointer trails (uncheck this button). Apparently this was using GPU and when the GPU was around 100%, this would cause erratic mouse movement.
There should be a Quadro M1200 GPU icon on the task bar. Click on it and check how many apps are running on the GPU. Next minimize all the windows and right click on the Windows desktop and open the NVIDIA Control Panel. Under 3D Settings:
Adjust image settings with preview: Click the button -> Use my preference emphasizing Performance (drag the selector to Performance end)
Manage 3D settings: Global presets->Base profile -> Preferred graphics processor change to Integrated graphics instead of High-performance NVIDIA processor. This is prevent many apps from using the GPU unnecessarily.
Set PhysX Configuration: Select CPU instead of Quadro M1200 processor.
Make sure to click the APPLY buttons at the bottom of the pages.
Next click on the Quadro M1200 icon on the task bar and try to kill all the processes like Teams, OneDrive etc. using the GPU. The processes need to be killed manually as it wont stop using the GPU until they are killed once. You can reboot you laptop so that the processes will be killed. Next when you start the apps and click on the Quadro M1200 icon on the task bar. It should not show any processes running on the GPU like image below:
You will now see in Task Manager that the CPU% and GPU% remains below 10% most of the time and your mouse erratic delays and freeze issue will be fixed. Enjoy!
