Comments on: Wireless transfers are interfering with my cursor

Question: Wireless transfers are interfering with my cursor

clockwork — Thu, 15 Jan 2004 20:53:00 -0800

I have put a wireless card in my old ibm laptop. now the cursor jumps up the screen every time the transfer light blinks. this makes internet navigation rather difficult. [more]

I have tried two different brands of wireless card with similar results. All drivers are up to date and win2k tells me there are no shared resources. Also, an ethernet card in the same slot gave me no such nonsense. I have noticed if the transfer is very slow, no jumping occurs.

By: Galvatron

Galvatron — Thu, 15 Jan 2004 21:27:58 -0800

I assume you are *not* using a wireless mouse with the laptop?

By: kickingtheground

kickingtheground — Thu, 15 Jan 2004 21:39:03 -0800

Will the cursor jump even if you aren't moving the mouse at the time? Some more details might help.

By: clockwork

clockwork — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 07:26:30 -0800

nope, no wireless mouse. i have tried a regular corded mouse connected through the usb port, it doesn't help. i've also tried disabling the IR port.

the cursor jumps regardless of what i do. it always jumps straight up and only when transfering over the network.

if it helps, it's a Thinkpad 770X. nothing out of the ordinary.

thanks.

By: armoured-ant

armoured-ant — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:01:29 -0800

I wonder if your wifi card is giving the processor a lot to think about; doing all the exciting calculations involved in tranceiving wireless networking things, and there's less CPU time left for such frivolities as mouse pointer refreshes.

I am not a doctor. This is best guess medicine.

By: Galvatron

Galvatron — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:26:06 -0800

Can you completely disable the trackpoint, maybe from the BIOS? Trackpoints have some sort of adaptive feedback loop to keep the pointer from drifting all over the place; if the feedback loop is getting interrupted by the wireless card (bizarre), then I would not be surprised to see the behavior you describe.

By: clockwork

clockwork — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 11:00:15 -0800

Galvatron - thanks. it hadn't dawned on me that plugging in a mouse w/out disabling the trackpoint would get me nowhere. i'm still confounded as to the path of the interference.

By: zsazsa

zsazsa — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 11:45:47 -0800

What's the brand and model of the network card? This sounds like bad hardware/driver design on the part of the network card.

By: clockwork

clockwork — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 13:33:09 -0800

the card that's currently in is a Lucent Technologies WaveLAN Silver Turbo (!?), but the same problem occurred with a Linksys WPC11 ver.3. bleah.

also, if it wasn't clear before, the jumping about stops when the trackpoint is disabled.