I was using Windows 11 on my Lenovo Yoga today, and suddenly my cursor started jumping to the top left corner of my screen. This was happening every few seconds, and it even happened when I wasn't touching the trackpad or screen.
I did the following troubleshooting steps to try to resolve the issue, all of which were unsuccessful:
- I restarted the computer.
- I cleaned the sides of the trackpad with a toothpick in case something was stuck.
- I adjusted the mouse pointer speed in the mouse settings.
- I performed a clean boot.
- I updated the drivers and BIOS by using Lenovo System Update several times.
- I disabled the trackpad in Windows Settings.
- I disabled the touchscreen using Device Manager and plugged in a mouse.
- I disabled every mouse listed in Device Manager.
- I attempted to update the drivers for the mouse, touchscreen, and trackpad.
- I turned off Bluetooth incase a wireless mouse was somehow connected.
- I hit my computer hard many times.
- I created a Pop!_OS bootable USB and booted into it to ensure that it wasn't a Windows setting that was causing this.
Even when I booted into Linux, I was still experiencing my cursor jumping around the screen to the top left corner. Curiously however, the cursor didn't jump around when I was in the system BIOS. This meant that it probably wasn't strictly a hardware issue.
The culprit
The culprit was not the touchpad, touchscreen, or mouse: it was the "Pen."
I found this curious because my Lenovo Yoga did not come with a Pen, nor have I ever used one with this laptop. But disabling the pen fixes the issue.
Disabling the pen on Windows
To disable the pen on Windows, open the start menu, type "Device Manager," then select Device Manager to open it. Inside Device Manager, open Human Interface Devices, right-click HID-compliant pen, then select Disable device.
It may take a few attempts to do this successfully while the cursor is jumping around, but once you disable the pen it should stop the cursor jumping immediately. If you disable the pen and the cursor is still jumping around, then you unfortunately have a different problem.
Disabling the pen on Linux
To disable the pen on Linux, you'll need a package called xinput. I'll let you look up the instructions for installing that on your respective distro.
Once you've ensured that xinput is installed, run the following command to list the devices:
xinput list
xinput should display a list like the one below:
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SYNACFFE:00 06CB:CEFE Mouse id=9 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SYNACFFE:00 06CB:CEFE Touchpad id=10 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom HID 5362 Pen stylus id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom HID 5362 Pen eraser id=16 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom HID 5362 Finger touch id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Logitech USB Optical Mouse id=8 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Ideapad extra buttons id=13 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ sof-hda-dsp Headphone id=14 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=15 [slave keyboard (3)]
Look for the entry named Wacom HID 5362 Pen stylus and grab its ID. You can disable the device by it's ID with the following command:
# "11" is the device ID for the pen that we found in the step above.
xinput disable 11
You can run xinput list again to confirm that the pen device has been disabled:
xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SYNACFFE:00 06CB:CEFE Mouse id=9 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SYNACFFE:00 06CB:CEFE Touchpad id=10 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom HID 5362 Pen eraser id=16 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Logitech USB Optical Mouse id=8 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom HID 5362 Finger touch id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Ideapad extra buttons id=13 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ sof-hda-dsp Headphone id=14 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=15 [slave keyboard (3)]
∼ Wacom HID 5362 Pen stylus
Once you disable the pen, it should stop the cursor jumping immediately. If you disable the pen and the cursor is still jumping around, then you unfortunately have a different problem.
I hope you found this helpful. I'm frustrated that I'm experiencing this issue: in the year and a half I've owned this machine I've probably only used it less than 100 hours. If I had purchased the machine for digital art I'd be furious. Thankfully I'm terrible at art, so I can continue using this machine without missing the pen functionality.
Top comments (24)
THANK YOU!
I signed up to dev.to just to say that. I love my Lenovo Yoga. I use it for my university studies, but I noticed the mouse cursor behaving erratically while the computer was doing something intensive. I thought it was a glitch with the trackpad. I recently bought a mouse so that I could play some games during the Christmas break, and found everything to be totally unplayable with the mouse cursor jumping around so erratically.
Disabling the pen worked perfect! Of course, I will still need the pen - I keep all my course notes in OneNote - but at least I can disable it now when need be.
From my own research, it sounds like this has been an ongoing issue with Lenovo Yoga series laptops for several years now (I see one post from 2018 complaining of the same issue). It's a shame they won't address the issue. I hope it's only a software issue and not a hardware one.
Anyway, thank you for making games playable!
signed up just to say thank you as well :)
I'm glad this was helpful. I sure wish that Lenovo would fix it.
Just had this exact same issue and this article solved it
I tried the tried and true method of unplugging the mouse, disabling touchpad, and touchscreen, and was about to try a bios update when 5 minutes of searching found this article for the win
I'm glad this helped. There are a lot more people viewing this article than I expected: this seems to be a common hardware defect.
omg thank you KING!! it was only doing this when i was trying to play the sims 4 😭 which made it impossible. but this fixed my issue! i thought a fuzz was on the touch screen causing it to do this haha
I'm a Sys Admin and we have deployed dozens of Lenovo Yoga 7 (AMD) laptops across my work environment.
I had about half my end users complain about a mouse glitch where the mouse just randomly jumps to the top corner of the screen. Sometimes it does it several times a day, sometimes it doesn't do it at all.
I narrowed it down to the default HID drivers that Windows installs when you first plug in a mouse, keyboard or ANY Human Interface Device (including Bluetooth devices like the pen).
Removing or disabling these drivers from Device Manager WON'T fix it. Windows will simply re-install the HID drivers again when you reboot and you will end up with multiple HID (Human interface device) drivers for the same device.
Long story short, use a keyboard or mouse that has dedicated drivers and install those drivers, not devices that depend on the awful HID drivers that Windows uses by default. For the Pen that comes with you Yoga, make SURE you install the drivers for it from Lenovo, don't let Windows use the default HID drivers for the Pen.
This is how I fixed it for my end users:
Where I work, we use Logitech Unifying Software for our keyboards and mice. Most of my End Users also use an external screen / docking station with their Yoga 7 laptops as well.
Instead of allowing Windows to default install a keyboard or mouse with "HID drivers", I used the Logitech Unifying Software to install these devices.
How you do this is go to Logitech's website and find the "Logitech Unifying Software", download and install it. The install is about 4MB.
Once installed, you Click "Advanced", this button will be on the first window that pops up once the software is installed. If you have a Logitech Unifying receiver plugged into your laptop, it will show you all the Logitech devices that are currently installed. Go ahead and click the "check for updates" button and wait a few seconds. if you have any kind of internet, the software will update itself in about 5 seconds.
Warning: before doing the next step make sure your touch pad is working or have a spare USB mouse just in case.
"Un-Pair" all your devices and re-pair them so they get a fresh update. you will likely lose your mouse (if you are using a wireless Logitech mouse) so make sure your touch pad is working as you will need a non-Logitech device to do the "re-Pairing".
You will need to flip the power switch off and then back on during the pairing process.
Once done, all the end users I did this for reported no more mouse glitch.
This is a super thorough write up. This is gonna help some people for sure!
Ive been having this issue with a brand new lenovo yoga and this fixed my problem! THANKS!! ive been looking all over the web and nothing was helping! THANK YOUUUUUU!!!!
I'm glad this helped!
THANK YOU. I was going crazy.
Issue solved
I'm glad this was able to make your computer usable again!
Thanks Tyler! Curious how you discovered the resolution.
Great work!
I sunk a whole day into this because I needed the laptop to work. I eventually realized that I should try to debug on Linux instead of Windows. People who use Linux and post on the Linux forums tend to be power users.
Some Linux forum post led me towards the
xinputcommand, which is how I discovered that there was a "pen stylus" input in the first place. When I disabled that, the problem went away, then I just had to figure out how to do the same thing back on Windows.This worked like a gem - thank you!
Whoa, you found this the day after this article was published too! I'm glad this was able to fix your problem 🙂
Thank you very much for sharing, I have the same problem, but I want to use the screen pen. I use the computer for remote teaching and disabling the pen is not an option. Jumping cursor is very annoying during the lecture. I tried many options even factory reset, but nothing works. Disabling the pen means we disabled the touch screen. This means that most probably there is a physical problem in the screen touch sensitive layers. If the computer is still under warranty, I recommend to send it for fixing, maybe changing the whole screen.
It seems like a hardware problem. You might want to contact Lenovo.
I made an account here to say thank you. I’ve been at it for 3 days trying to figure this out.
Oh my god you are a life saver!!! This was the fix!!!