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 (8)
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.
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 🙂
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.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.