Wireless mouse interference.

I thought I had some sort of resources problem on a laptop computer. I don't get on well with a touchpad, so use a wireless mouse instead. The mouse would behave peculiarly or even stop working altogether when an external USB drive was plugged into the laptop's second USB port. No real problem, just use a wired mouse when the USB drive is plugged in.

I got more intrigued when this happened on my main computer. I use a powered USB hub with this and the wireless mouse receiver is plugged into it. When a USB 3.0 external drive was also plugged into the hub, the mouse stopped working.

Curiosity caused an Internet search that brought up these results...

https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2020...stops-working/

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us...nce-paper.html

The second link leads to a PDF that is technical but what it amounts to is that, if an external drive is plugged into more or less the same location as a wireless mouse, it might interfere with mouse's operation. In my case the problem was overcome by taking the mouse receiver out of the USB hub and plugging it into a USB port on the computer. I haven't tried it but I'd think a similar cure would work with the laptop computer. Perhaps plug one or the other device in via a USB hub.

Just something worth knowing about maybe.

Re: Wireless mouse interference.

Worth noting for sure. I prefer to use a Bluetooth mouse on my laptop as it has built in Bluetooth and the slip I put the laptop in for transport is pretty tight so even the very short USB radios that are used might need to be taken out and could maybe be lost.

I do use a wireless mouse with my desktop because there is no shortage of ports and they are cheaper. I stick it into a front port but have cables to the usb3 ports at the back for use with disks so that's probably why I haven't come across this.