Mouse Cursor Won't Display in Full Screen Games
Whenever I run a game full screen, if it doesn't have a custom cursor built into the game, I basically can't play it, because for some reason, my system mouse cursor simply won't display when I run any game in full screen. I know it's still there, because I can see menu item rollovers animating when my cursor passes over them, so with some doing I can usually navigate my way to an option screen to run the game in a window.
But still, this is just silly. What could be causing this?
Solution 1:
Try going into 'Control Panel' through the start menu, and accessing the 'Mouse' option.
Under the 'Pointer Options' tab, uncheck 'Display pointer trails' and press 'Apply'. (this seems to be a common issue)
Under the 'Pointers' tab, uncheck 'Enable pointer shadow'.
If you are running Windows 7, or possibly Vista (not sure about vista), go into the 'Personalization' option within Control Panel, and try switching the theme from 'Aero' to 'Basic'.
From there, you could try installing the latest graphics drivers.
Find them here for Nvidia: (Often named 'GeForce'. Recent cards are in a series of '8xxx', '9xxx', '2xx', '3xx', '4xx', '5xx', '6xx'.)
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
Find them here for Ati: (Often named 'Radeon'. Recent cards are in a series of '3xxx', '4xxx', '5xxx', '6xxx', '7xxx'.)
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
Find them here for Intel: (Often referred to as embedded, onboard, or non-discrete.)
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/
Solution 2:
The answer Lemmings19 gave might indeed fix the issue. But I have had a similar issue and the above fix still did not work.
However, my issue was solved by playing the game (it was a rather old one) in compatibility mode. To do this follow the following steps:
- Right click the game's .exe file.
- Go to properties
- Go to the compatibility
- Check Run this program in compatibility mode for:
- Select where you wish to run it in from the dropdown menu (depending on the age of the game, you might have to try different ones, although most issues should be fixed with just using windows XP).
- If the above steps did not fix the problem yet, try to check Disable visual themes in the same menu.