Taming Mouse Lag: My Journey to Find a Solution

If you’ve ever experienced frustrating mouse lag, you know how it can disrupt your workflow. I recently faced this issue with my new Lenovo ThinkPad P51 and managed to resolve about 75% of it by removing Cortana. However, I’m still grappling with that final 25%, and I’m eager to explore further solutions.

For the past several days, I’ve dedicated over 50 hours trying to get my new laptop to operate smoothly, particularly when working with Flash-based slides in Google Chrome—a critical part of my daily tasks. No matter what I tried, the persistent mouse stutter remained; the cursor would lag every three to five seconds, making it exasperating to accomplish even simple tasks.

I took the usual troubleshooting steps: uninstalling and reinstalling drivers and programs, as well as performing a complete system restore. Though these measures provided some improvement, they weren’t enough to fully address the problem.

Interestingly, after some research, I discovered that Cortana could contribute to mouse lag. Upon removing her, I noticed a significant improvement, but the issue persists. While I found that minimizing the window or scaling down the slides lessens the lag, this isn’t a practical solution, as I need to maintain visibility of my full work area.

I’m reaching out to the community for any additional suggestions. If anyone has experienced similar issues and found effective fixes, your advice would be greatly appreciated.

Update: Thanks to all who have contributed ideas so far! I have implemented nearly all suggestions, yet the issue has not been entirely resolved. It’s worth noting that the mouse behaves flawlessly outside of the Flash slides, and the interruptions only commence once I interact with the slides directly. Any further insights would be invaluable as I continue my quest for a solution.