Table of Contents

Background

For a while lately, I’ve been dealing with a very frustrating issue on my Windows 10 desktop and laptop. Whenever I would turn on my computer, the mouse cursor would lag horribly for around 20 seconds.

Apologies for the poor recording, it’s difficult to get with screen capture software.

Weirdly, the mouse would almost always return to normal after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl+Shift+Esc (which opens Task Manager). While I’m not familiar with how Windows works, I know that Ctrl+Alt+Del produces a kernel interrupt which may be why it fixes it. I don’t know what’s special about opening Task Manager which would fix it. Anywho, this is was getting annoying and I couldn’t figure out why.

Culprit

The culprit ended up being Synergy 2. How did I figure this out? Nothing more than an educated guess really. Why is it causing this? Not a clue.

To disable Synergy until you need it, you need to go into Services. Simply killing all the running executables isn’t enough, as Synergy registers a service which will automatically restart them. Find “Synergy” in the list, right-click and go to Properties -> Startup type -> Manual.

Synergy Windows service
Set the Synergy service to start manually

You’ll just need to manually start and stop the Synergy service now whenever you want to use it.