Wireless transfers are interfering with my cursor

January 15, 2004 8:53 PM

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.

posted by clockwork to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I assume you are *not* using a wireless mouse with the laptop?
posted by Galvatron at 9:27 PM on January 15, 2004

Will the cursor jump even if you aren't moving the mouse at the time? Some more details might help.
posted by kickingtheground at 9:39 PM on January 15, 2004

Response by poster: 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.
posted by clockwork at 7:26 AM on January 16, 2004

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.
posted by armoured-ant at 8:01 AM on January 16, 2004

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.
posted by Galvatron at 8:26 AM on January 16, 2004

Response by poster: 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.
posted by clockwork at 11:00 AM on January 16, 2004

What's the brand and model of the network card? This sounds like bad hardware/driver design on the part of the network card.
posted by zsazsa at 11:45 AM on January 16, 2004

Response by poster: 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.
posted by clockwork at 1:33 PM on January 16, 2004