Does anyone else's Mac mouse do this?

ngray · 18th July 2008, 05:17 PM

My standard corded mouse seems to have a mind of it's own sometimes, I move it and it shoots off to another part of the screen, totally not where I'm trying to move it to. It's usually to any of the on-screen icons and not predictable in any way. For example, I'll move it down and right and see it go first up or left and then take up on where I'm moving it to. It's really annoying sometimes

Sorry it's a bit hard to describe, but just wondering if anyone else knows this or what it might be? I asked around in some Mac forums and there was no conclusive answer. Sometimes it goes to an icon on the dock e.g. trash, sometimes to the very top, and sometimes to one of the firefox buttons (usually color picker).

It's a 17" iMac running OS X 10.4.11, with the standard wired optical mouse. It just did it again as I was previewing this post, I moved mouse towards the scrollbar and it shot to the "Quote" button on the post.

Terra · 18th July 2008, 06:06 PM

Do you have the cursor set to automatically move to buttons etc? I know there's a setting in Windows which does that (e.g. if a pop-up window comes up, the cursor moves immediately to the yes / no buttons).

ngray · 18th July 2008, 06:16 PM

I thought of that, but couldn't find a similar setting on the Mac. Auto focus I think it's called in Windows. I would be surprised if it's turned on by default though cos it's a real pain. And no, when I get a dialog box up it doesn't focus the mouse on it then. But the dialog box does get keyboard focus which is what I'd expect.

Terra · 18th July 2008, 10:42 PM

mh - sometimes I find that something as simple as dirt on the mousepad can disorientate it. Maybe time to splash out on a new wireless mouse?