Question Mouse keeps freezing

[Mercious089]

Hello everyone,

I have an issue on my laptop that has Windows 10 installed (Lenovo Y50-70) with my connected USB-mouse (Steelseries Sensei). At random times, the mouse cursor freezes and I cannot use the connected mouse anymore. The laptops touch pad keeps working. My headset, which is also connected via USB, also keeps working and is not affected in any way.
I am having a very hard time making this issue reproducible and also the steps that I need to take so that the mouse works again. In most cases, when I disconnect the mouse and reconnect it, it will work again. However, during the last few hours of testing this issue, I also had cases where that did not work. Uninstalling the mouse from the device manager did not work either, restarting the PC did not work. I booted into another OS that I have on dual boot (Ubuntu) and there it worked fine. More or less sporadically I got the mouse to work again in Windows.
I also noticed that the mouse often has mini freezes before the final, permanent freeze.

The mouse very consistently freezes when I try to play a game. It almost always freezes within 1 minute of starting the game and doing something in it. Often, when the mouse freezes ingame, it enters this hard-to-recover state mentioned above where unplugging and replugging it does not fix it.
When the mouse is in its frozen state, Windows does not seem to recognize that. In the device manager the mouse shows up as running and working fine.
When the mouse is in this hard-to-recover state, unplugging and replugging it makes it show up in the Human Interface Devices in the device manager, where it's marked with an warning sign. It says that the device could not be started, error code 10. Not sure if the last point is of any use, I think that's just a follow-up issue of whatever happened before the freeze.

I have already done the following things trying to fix the issue:

• Uninstalling / Reinstalling the mouse in the device manager
• Reinstalling the drivers
• Using a different USB-port
• Deactivating the energy saving options regarding USB-devices in the energy saving plan that I am using
• Deactivating any option that allows the PC to turn off devices to save energy in the device-manager for the Human Interface Devices, Mice and other pointer devices and USB-Controller entries

I ran out of ideas what I can do and test. I don't know how to approach this issue. I don't even know who is at fault here - the mouse (hardware), the laptop (hardware) or Windows 10 (software). I will have to try and get my hands on an alternative mouse to kind of make sure that it's not the mouse itself.
I have been using this mouse for two years on my desktop PC, without any issues. It's the first time using it on this laptop and it's the first time in a longer time (2ish years) that I use this laptop to play a game.
I think I have access to another laptop, but because the mouse only really consistently freezes in the game, I think it might be related to stress/heavy loads or something. I can't install games on the other laptops that I could possibly access, so that would be hard to reproduce.
The fact that the mouse also sometimes crashes under windows makes me believe it's not the specific game that is at fault, so there is that.

If any of you have any idea what else I could test, I would gladly do so. I think this is a very niche and probably not a fixable issue, but by trying whatever might come to your guys mind I might end up fixing it.
Thanks a lot for reading and have a nice evening!

 

[Ralston18]

You might find some diagnostic information via Reliability History/Manager and Event Viewer. Error codes or warnings that occur just before or at the time of the mouse freezes.

Could be that something in Windows is corrupted or buggy. The built-in Windows 10 troubleshooters may find and fix something. Or running "sfc /scannow" (without quotes) via the command prompt might work.

Do indeed try the mouse on another computer(s). And another known working mouse (or mice) on your computer. Determine if the freezes follow the mouse or stay with the computer(s)

 

[androbourne]

Go on the manufactures website and see if they have any firmware updates for the mouse. I had this same issue with my logitec mouse and a firmware update fixed it. Havn't had the problem since.

 

[Mercious089]

You might find some diagnostic information via Reliability History/Manager and Event Viewer. Error codes or warnings that occur just before or at the time of the mouse freezes.

Yeah I have tried searching these places already, however I found nothing that seems to relate to the mouse issue in there, just some general security warning stuff and that's it, sadly. But that was definitely a good idea - I was kind of expecting to find at least something there, but apparently not.

Could be that something in Windows is corrupted or buggy. The built-in Windows 10 troubleshooters may find and fix something. Or running "sfc /scannow" (without quotes) via the command prompt might work.

I tried executing "sfc /scannow" but it seems like there is some buggy update-state in windows, as it tells me that a system repair is pending. I can find a lot of threads about this on the internet, many suggesting to delete the pending.xml file in the windows-folder. But even with admin rights, I can't get it to work, it still tells me that I do not have the rights to do so. Another proposed way of fixing it is a dsim.exe command, but that one fails with something along the lines of "the target is a running image" etc.
Probably the best course of action is to reinstall a fresh copy of windows. I will have to buy a USB-stick somewhere, but I think this is the best shot at tackeling the software issues. If, after a fresh windows-install, the mouse still has these issues, then it should be the mouse.
I suppose I can use this new windows image creation (Media Creation Tool) tool - that should be a completely fresh image, even if I create it from this possibly broken Windows installation, right?

Do indeed try the mouse on another computer(s). And another known working mouse (or mice) on your computer. Determine if the freezes follow the mouse or stay with the computer(s)

Along with the USB-stick I will buy a really cheap laptop mouse to test, I really need to see if it's not actually the mouse, yeah.

Thanks a lot for your input, Ralston18!

Go on the manufactures website and see if they have any firmware updates for the mouse. I had this same issue with my logitec mouse and a firmware update fixed it. Havn't had the problem since.

I think SteelSeries only has this weird SteelSeries Engine which handles all software/firmware related stuff for their products. Initially I did not have it installed, issues where already existing back then. I then installed the SteelSeries Engine, but it sadly did not fix the issue. Seems like SteelSeries does not provide any other type of firmware-downloads, everything is supposed to be handled by this SteelSeries Engine Software-piece.

Thanks a lot for your input as well, androbourne!

 

[Mercious089]

Just a quick update:
I have installed a fresh copy of Windows 10. I had one mouse freeze at the very beginning, shortly after the PC booted when it finished installing. I thought, hoped it maybe was the fact that the drivers were installed the very first time, by windows.
I was able to use the mouse for ~5 hours, which is like ten times as long as it has ever worked in countless attempts before. But today, after using the laptop again, the same crap happens. I saw that windows installed the Synaptic driver, which is some sort of driver for the touch pad, uninstalled that and hoped this one might be causing it - but the issue persists. I don't think there was anything else that was installed overnight / upon this day's reboot. There is no relevant recovery point as well.
I think that at this point software and any windows-related topics are kind of proven not to be at fault. It must be either the PCs hardware or the mouse itself. I could not reproduce the mouse issue on other laptops that I have available. But due to the nature of undefined behavior, it might have just been bad luck (or good luck, however you see it). Right now I don't have access to test any other mouse on this laptop - it probably comes down to me testing the current, buggy mouse extensively on my desktop PC when I am back at home.