Mouse Jitter Problems

I solved two different mouse problems that I thought were being caused by the same thing - a bad mouse.

I have a Razer Copperhead mouse.  It is several years old and has dpi and sensitivity adjustments, as well as some other features.  In order to use all of the features, you have to install a Razer control panel.  Not my favorite thing to do, but I did.  I flashed it to the latest firmware also.  At this time, it is driver 6.10 and firmware 6.32.

I was having two problems.  The first is that when I would drag a window across my desktop in Windows 7, the Aero shake feature would activate.  This feature minimizes all windows except the one that you are dragging.

The second problem was in Linux Mint 14, which is an Ubuntu derivative without the Unity interface.  In Linux Mint, there is a hot corner in the upper left.  When you move your mouse there, the desktop shrinks and presents all of your workspaces.  This was happening whenever I dragged a window around, and sometimes when I was just moving the mouse.

My first thought was that the driver for the mouse was registering strange jumps, which would activate the shake and possibly trigger the hot corner.  I tried another mouse, and I did not have the Aero Shake problem.  I watched the mouse when using the copperhead and noticed that it was very jittery.  I tried to adjust the dpi and sensitivity settings, but I was unable to resolve this.

In Linux Mint, I knew that I had not installed the guest additions for VirtualBox, so I went to install from the supplied guest additions.  I then noted that the guest additions were already installed.  Linux Mint must have been smart enough to figure it was a VM and installed the packaged during the initial setup.  I noticed that the additions from VirtualBox were newer, so I uninstalled the provided ones, rebooted, and installed the guest additions from VirtualBox.  Mouse problem solved.

My next step was to uninstall the Razer software, which left crap behind.  Specifically, the copperhd.cpl file was left in windows\system32 somewhere, so I had to delete that.  The .cpl file creates a control panel entry, but doesn't cause any problems other than being an eyesore.

My final solution is a Gigabyte Thor mouse.  It is a little bigger, but tracks much more smoothly. It does have an obnoxious blue light coming out from the laser area, but it usually doesn't matter unless you pick the mouse up.  I'm not sure what I'll do with the copperhead.  It does not track smoothly using the default windows drivers either, and still triggers Aero Shake.