I woke up from a nap last night (yes, shh) to my PC having updated and my mouse not working. What a lovely surprise! The internet was incredibly unhelpful so I will try to help you.
The final solution was simply that all my front USB ports, or maybe all my USB 2.0 ports (not sure which) stopped working, and plugging the mouse into a back port (directly in the motherboard), which is also a USB 3.0 port, fixed the problem. I still haven’t fixed the problem of the front ports not working, but at least I have a working mouse.
Here’s some other things I tried, along with clarifications on other internet tutorials (mainly this The Geek Page one).
Use a different mouse
See if it’s a problem with your specific manufacturer device driver (Logitech, Razer, etc).
Plug it into a different USB port
This didn’t work for me for several hours as I was trying only front ports / only USB 2.0 ports. Finally I had the foresight to see if my headset that was plugged into the front port worked; it didn’t, so I tried plugging the mouse into a back port (kind of a hassle because the cord doesn’t easily reach), and it did! Thank god!
Make sure you try:
- USB 2.0
- USB 3.0
- Front ports
- Back ports (directly plugged into motherboard)
Corollary: Plug other types of devices into the USB ports you’re testing and see if those devices work.
SFC scan
One of the first software things I tried doing was an SFC scan, as suggested by this The Geek Page walkthrough and explained by this other tutorial (or simply the official Microsoft support docs). However, they don’t explain how to do it without a working mouse.
- Windows-key to open Start Menu
- Type
cmd Ctrl+Shift+Enterto run as AdministratorShift+Tab(orTaba couple times), thenEnterto confirm permissions- Now we can follow their instructions - first run
DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth. This will take a while and slow down around 60% - Then run
sfc /scannow- note there is a space aftersfc. This takes less time than step 5 - Now restart your system
Disable USB selective suspend setting
I doubt this will work, but just because the The Geek Page walkthrough doesn’t explain how to do any of this without a mouse, you need to use arrow keys up/down to scroll through options then right to expand. Press D or E to disable/enable, and Enter to confirm. When this doesn’t work (restart your PC for good measure to make sure, always restart your PC when making changes & troubleshooting broken things), you should re-enable the setting.
Uninstall the graphics driver
I had made some changes to random graphics driver files and so I thought maybe this was related, so I tried uninstalling my graphics driver. This did not help. If you’re going to try this, do it as a last resort (maybe short of a system restore), I doubt it will be useful, and it will be SIGNIFICANTLY harder to get anything done when you have only one working monitor.
Boot into safe mode and see if it works there
Actually my PC boots too fast for me to boot into safe mode, so that didn’t go so well…but here’s an article on how to get into safe mode in Windows 10. This will at least rule out hardware issues.
