Flickering cursor

htnakirs · 10-24-2009, 09:10 AM

I have a Lenovo 3000 laptop, with Celeron 550 (2 GHz), 1 GB, 160 GB etc.

In XP (and in Vista to some extent), the mouse pointer flickers quite rapidly at boot time. This makes it difficult to find the cursor on the screen. In Vista the flickering is observed, but the cursor can be spotted.
Initially, I thought this could be because the CPU was getting fully utilised due to programs loading at startup time. But a complete reinstall did not remedy the situation.

The flickering sometimes seemed to somehow be linked to the HDD activity LED, so I presumed that probably there is nothing much else to do except wait.

Then, by chance, I discovered that pressing the ALT key immediately stopped the flickering. No more linkage to CPU or HDD activity, even at startup pressing the Alt key stopped the flickering.

This has led me to believe that this could be a keyboard issue, and some rogue key is continuously depressed causing the mouse to flicker - till interrupted by the Alt key. So far I have been unable to find this key. It is not the normal letter and number keys, that is for sure, since opening up notepad with the flickering cursor did not produce any keyboad output.

I would like to know if there is any utility that displays the status of the keys on the keypad. Or are there other areas to look at.

10-24-2009, 09:10 AM	#1 (permalink)
htnakirs Registered User Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 1 OS: 98	Flickering cursor I have a Lenovo 3000 laptop, with Celeron 550 (2 GHz), 1 GB, 160 GB etc. In XP (and in Vista to some extent), the mouse pointer flickers quite rapidly at boot time. This makes it difficult to find the cursor on the screen. In Vista the flickering is observed, but the cursor can be spotted. Initially, I thought this could be because the CPU was getting fully utilised due to programs loading at startup time. But a complete reinstall did not remedy the situation. The flickering sometimes seemed to somehow be linked to the HDD activity LED, so I presumed that probably there is nothing much else to do except wait. Then, by chance, I discovered that pressing the ALT key immediately stopped the flickering. No more linkage to CPU or HDD activity, even at startup pressing the Alt key stopped the flickering. This has led me to believe that this could be a keyboard issue, and some rogue key is continuously depressed causing the mouse to flicker - till interrupted by the Alt key. So far I have been unable to find this key. It is not the normal letter and number keys, that is for sure, since opening up notepad with the flickering cursor did not produce any keyboad output. I would like to know if there is any utility that displays the status of the keys on the keypad. Or are there other areas to look at.