Mouse pointer disappears in secondary monitor in Vista – A workaround

If you are using Vista and have a secondary display monitor attached to your laptop, you might have encountered this issue. What happens is, once your computer goes to sleep and then you wake it up, you are not able to see the mouse pointer in the secondary monitor though if you move it to the laptop monitor, it is visible. Once this happens, the only way to get back the pointer is to restart Vista. A real pain.

Apparently, the issue appears only in computers with certain nVIDIA display cards. Not really sure whether the problem is with Vista or with the nVIDIA driver for Vista. Whatever be the reason, there doesn’t appear to be a fix for it.

However, there is an easy way to work around the problem.

Here is what you need to do.

• Open up the Control Panel and go to the Mouse settings.
• In the Mouse Properties window that pops up, go to the Pointer Options tab.
• Under Visibility, enable the Display pointer trails.

• Drag the slider to the extreme left so that the trails are the shortest. At this level the trails are virtually imperceptible unless you move the mouse very rapidly.

This somehow eliminates the pointer disappearance problem. Now, your mouse pointer should be visible on your secondary screen even after your computer goes to sleep and comes back.

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