It can be rather irritating to see our cursor or mouse pointer goes off sight time and time again. There are reasons why our mouse pointer is missing, such as incompatibility issues, corrupt drivers, incorrect installations and others. For this reason, it is important for us to fix this issue completely, especially if the disappearing problem seems to recur frequently. The first thing we should do is to go into the Control Panel and choose Hardware and Sound. In there, we should located Devices and Printer to find the Mouse section. The Mouse Properties windows should be opened and we could go to the Pointers tab to specify the shape and size of our mouse pointer. Check whether the “Hide pointer” checkbox is checked, if it is then we need to uncheck it. In the meantime, we could also change our mouse’s speed and visibility to improve its performance. After we make all the necessary changes, we could click Apply and close the window.
We could check whether the mouse pointer appears after we perform this simple task, if so, then the problem is solved. However, most of the time, the mouse pointer isn’t hidden and the problem could be caused by incorrect installation. In fact, damaged video drivers could also cause problem with mouse performance. To check whether this is the problem, we could download the latest driver for graphics card and uninstall the existing one in our computer. If we are using Windows 7, it is important that we obtain the administrator access to our computer. This is essential because standard users can’t make these changes. We could start the process by typing mmc devmgmt.msc in the search field, within the pop-up Start panel. The file will be shown and we could right-click it and choose to run it as an administrator.
This will bring us to the Device Manager windows and we could right click any shown graphics card driver and uninstall it. In some cases, we could be prompted to enter our admin password to confirm the action. When done, we could reboot the computer. Graphics card drivers are typically released as executable files and we could click them to start the installation process. If we use the correct and compatible drivers, not only mouse cursor will return, we could also get numerous bug fixes and in some cases, slight performance improvement. Graphics card drivers should be obtained directly from the manufacturer’s official website or directly from AMD or Nvidia itself. This should be a proven and tested solution to solve the cursor disappearing issues in Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Another reason of the disappearing mouse cursor is the existence of flash-embedded videos in one of our web browser tabs. In some cases, our cursor could start to reappear after we close these trouble-causing tabs. If we don’t use a standard Windows mouse that is supported by generic device driver already included in Windows OS, it is a good idea to uninstall and reinstall the driver. In some cases, the problem isn’t related to software, but it is because our mouse has reached the end of its lifespan and it needs to be replaced.