There are a lot of factors and options that affect how your mouse pointer moves, and some of these options are hidden deep in the settings. Whether you are doing design work, playing games, or just taking screenshots, it’s often difficult to move the mouse precisely to select the desired pixels. However, there are various ways you can improve the mouse pointing accuracy. In this tutorial we will teach you how to boost the mouse-pointing accuracy by tweaking the mouse settings.
Toggle Enhance Pointer Precision to ON or OFF
The Enhance Pointer Precision is a mouse acceleration feature. Basically, it changes the sensitivity of the mouse depending on the speed at which you are moving it. When it’s set to OFF, the only thing that controls the movement of your cursor is the distance you move the mouse. When it’s set to ON, it impacts the speed the mouse is moved.
With Enhance Pointer Precision set to ON, the faster you move the mouse, the farther the cursor moves. When you move your mouse slower, your cursor moves a smaller distance. This can prove very useful, especially when you want to select small things on the screen. This is a feature you want to leave enabled especially if you often use the laptop’s touchpad. To enable this feature, simply follow the steps below.
Click Settings on your Windows 10 PC and head to Devices. Select “Mouse & touchpad” on the left side of the Devices tab.
Scroll down and click on the setting that says “Additional mouse options.”
A mouse properties dialogue box will pop up. Select “Pointer Options.”
Check the box that reads “Enhance pointer precision.”
When Should You Turn Enhance Pointer Precision OFF?
Pointer acceleration varies from mouse to mouse and also depends on the screen’s resolution. Since gamers usually have a screen resolution that is different from the default screen resolution, it becomes hard to determine how fast or slow to move the mouse. Enabling this feature causes slow mouse movements to be very smooth which makes the pointer move slowly. Since gamers need to make quick reactions for short mouse distance, it becomes logical and a smart move to disable Enhance pointer precision.
Adjust your Mouse’s Pointer Speed and DPI
For various reasons you may want to tweak some settings to regulate how your mouse strikes. The two settings that you can change are pointer speed and DPI. Changing the pointer speed gives you total control of how far the cursor moves on the display in response to the movement of the mouse.
To change the pointer speed, head back to the same window where you toggled Enhance pointer precision and adjust the slider. Click on “Apply” to test your adjustments.
Some mice, particularly those intended for gaming purposes, come with an option to change the DPI. The DPI setting manages what the mouse reports to Windows. Windows then applies the DPI setting together with your preferred pointer speed to determine how far the mouse moves.
A higher DPI setting increases the pointer accuracy and also enables the mouse to better respond to small movements. Modern gaming mice come with buttons that allow users to increase or decrease DPI. If you have a mouse that allows you to change its DPI, you can do so through the mouse’s driver control panel, which you might need to install from the manufacturer’s website.
Other modern mice are designed with buttons that allow users to adjust the cursor speed to move slowly and smoothly when need be. This feature can be very useful in Photoshop and is widely used in online multiplayer games.
Wrapping Up
Changing the pointer speed and DPI settings can go a long way to boosting the pointing accuracy. Though these changes may not make much difference to the ordinary office guy, they can be very useful to graphic designers and gamers.
Kenn is a tech enthusiast by passion, Windows blogger by choice, and a massive coffee imbiber. He likes watching sci-fi movies in his free time and tearing gadgets apart so he can fix them.
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