So about a week ago, I finally got fed up with something my desktop machine was doing. Let me back up to about a week before that, as that’s about when I noticed it. The issue was that my cursor for no apparent reason kept flashing the default “busy” cursor constantly. At first (and for a few days), it was inconsistent, and happened only infrequently. It was enough to cause me to do a few cursory searches on Google, but they were to no avail. The problem continued to worsen over the next few days, and it was to the point where I had to find the problem, or I was going to reinstall the computer!

Keep in mind the original install date on my desktop is January 1, 2011. That was the last time I performed a fresh install of Windows 7 on that machine. The OS has been so stable, and problem-free that I actually decided to try doing an upgrade install of Windows 10, which is something I never do. I’ve never once been happy with an upgrade install of any Windows OS. I’ve always done fresh installs. However, I have to say that the Windows 10 upgrade was flawless, and has actually improved the performance of the machine in most respects (especially once I disabled OneDrive, turned off Cortana, and disabled anything that by default reached out to the internet for content). Long story short, I’ve been trying to keep from performing a clean install of Windows 10. After this much time, I have so many programs installed, and the settings just the way I like them, I don’t want to start over!

So back to the problem. The busy cursor was constantly flashing, and since we tend to look wherever we are moving the cursor, it was absolutely distracting and had to end! It was awful. Most searches of the issue showed results pointing to some piece of HP specific software for HP computers, while a few talked about some similar Asus software on Asus computers. We’re talking about pre-installed software here, which most PC vendors still do because it “improves” the performance, or the security, or some other aspect of the computer. Most of this type of software is utterly useless, and get immediately uninstalled whenever I have to deal with such a PC. Since my desktop is one I built myself, which I’ve done since my second PC, those solutions didn’t apply. However, nothing else was showing itself.

So I continued to noodle on it, and wasn’t having a whole lot of luck. Eventually my “solution” was to just switch out the default busy cursor with the default cursor, so both the default cursor and the busy cursor were the same cursor. This had the desired effect, and let me actually do some work, but it wasn’t an actual solution. After a couple days I came back to the issue when I had some time, and thought about it. Suddenly, I had an epiphany! I suddenly remembered having just this problem way back in the early days of Windows XP. I remembered then that the solution was to upgrade the firmware on my CD drive. Honestly, that fixed it and it never happened again, which is why it didn’t come immediately to mind!

So I set about finding and installing the latest firmware for my BD-R drive and my DVD-RW drive. This was not terribly difficult, and they both did have firmware upgrades. After installing the latest firmware, and rebooting the machine, lo and behold the flashing cursor had stopped (and yes, I had already swapped the default cursor back to the busy cursor!), and I think I must have sat there for 20 minutes or so just watching to see if it came back. It’s been more than a week now, and my solution still seems to be working. I even went to a Microsoft page pertaining to the problem and made a post about my solution (http://bit.ly/1SkuYMs).

So there it is. Hopefully this helps someone like it has me! I can now focus on working (or playing) again without being completely distracted by the blinking cursor!