So the other day…  My mouse on my home computer just started shaking, shaking and acting very erratic.   This was well after April fools day so I was fairly certain I wasn’t being punked.

Items plugged into this laptop are/were:

+ a Logitech VX Revolution (Wireless) Mouse.

+ a Logitech diNovo Edge Keyboard (also wireless).

+ a USB cable into my USB KVM which also shows up as a mouse/HID device

+ a Bluetooth presentation mouse, though not currently active.

I did the normal trouble shooting steps.   Made sure my anti-viri software was up-to-date. Plugging and unplugging mice and keyboards.  I *thought* it was the diNovo Edge as it also has a little track pad.   It would go away for a while but not permanently.

It made using the computer almost impossible.

After a little more research I found technet Article: The Microsoft mouse pointer moves erratically or does not respond when you use a Microsoft pointing device # Q321122 and was appalled at the 82 steps it took to fix this.   Why this is still an issue after almost 2 years, and why since it is an issue that there isn’t a utility to deal with the 2000 registry entries I had to manually delete is beyond me.

But if your mouse suddenly gets the shakes.  You may want to look into this.

FWIW, deleting all the devices from the device manager had a greater impact than deleting all the registry entries.

-Datapoohbah.

No offense was intended to those that actually have Parkinsons disease and shake like my mouse was shaking.  It would be nice if you could eliminate a few drivers and registry entries to get rid of it.

We’re currently evaluating our corporate Anti-virus products.

For the past couple years we’ve used Trend Office Scan.  For the most part it’s worked OK.  The interface and admin tools are horrible though and it’s also good at finding things but not necessarily cleaning it up.

Over the last couple months we’ve had a few (read more than 4) instances where computers were infected and Trend Office Scan was oblivious.

We’re up for renewal in February, so the timing is perfect to switch.

In the recent cases of infestation we’ve been able to limit the damage and clean up after trend with other 3rd party products.  Mostly free versions so this really makes us suspicious of Trends effectiveness.

For the record, we are not open to any Symantec solutions.  That’s just not going to happen.  We’re also not big fans of McAfee.   Those two companies seem more focused on Marketing than creating reliable usable products.

We’ve looked at AVG and Kaspersky and Microsoft ForeFront and are leaning towards AVG.

AVG looks great on the client side, but administratively it’s kind of week.

Kaspersky is just overkill, we’ve toned down UAC messages, and installing Kaspersky will remind you why you did so.  It’s also prohibitively expensive.

Microsoft ForeFront, really come on…  A corporate anti-virus solution should not have the complexity of Sharepoint to administer it.  It also shouldn’t need to use 3 different servers.

We are leaning towards AVG but we are open to suggestions.

Requirements include:

• Cost: < $20 a user
• Basic Anti-virus is really all we need, we don’t need another firewall product and we don’t need extended browser enhancements or even email scanning.
• Centralized updating and management is a MUST.  Our users shouldn’t ever need to do anything and we need to report on the condition of the product.

If you have a suggestion or a comment on any of these products please post away.

Thanks…