I've had a 'mind of its own' problem that happens with the cursor every so often every day. It started happening ever since I started using an external wireless mouse with Windows 8, I think. I can be moving the cursor to, say, the left of the screen and the cursor will just move quickly to the top and then towards the right. No matter how much I move the mouse, I can't get it to about the middle of the screen for about four seconds. I'm used to this happening now.

Yes, I understand that, hence why I expect some users will no longer wish to use Cortana. My point was that they have simply made a business decision which may or may not pay off in terms of Bing gaining a larger share of the search market, rather than acting out of "desperation" or being "Hell bent on taking away people's freedom".

I suspect that those of us who are keen on spouting such hyperbole probably don't even use Cortana, preferring to Google things by hand, whereas searching the Internet using Cortana is mostly useful hands-free; You ask it the capital of Honduras and it says, "Tegucigalpa", and who cares if it used Google or Bing in that instance, right?

I observed here when Windows 8 arrived that rather than give standard control stuff to do things, F1(the help access) told me to type a command in the combined search in order to then open a control panel object.

That was part of the same thing, pushing combined search, also in order to foist Bing onto all of us.

try checking the batteries. they are maybe past their best. its worth trying a change of batteries, as this is a small change.

also, check out the device manager. expand the mouse option and right/click it to uninstall the drivers. after the uninstall action, reboot. windows will reinstall them again.
hope this helps.

I have spanking new batteries in and it still happens sometimes. I'm used to it happening anyway. I may find out why it's happening sometime in the future but for now, I'll just wait for its little 'tantrums' to stop when they happen. If I uninstall the mouse driver, how can I reboot Windows using the cursor? The driver needs to be installed for the cursor to move.

Unplug the mouse, and replug it in. The pc will detect the hardware change and reinstall the driver.

In worst case, simply hold power button down until pc shuts down, and then restart pc.

I tried that the first time it started happening. I'll get another wireless mouse and see what that's like.

Windows 7 does indeed have a much better USB recording level than Windows 8.1 and 10. I forgot that I had an old laptop with 7 on and thought I'd test it out. You can easily be heard at 50% and yet this is way too low for 8.1 and 10.

Is it actuall a Windows or a driver issue. You cannot assume it is necessarily Windows.

Exactly. Most of the things that W10 is blamed for are actually driver problems.

Well, I'm assuming that the fact that Windows 7 still is most widely used is because of a much better USB microphone recording level/sensitivity.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

https://www.netmarketshare.com/opera...10&qpcustomd=0

It would be very interesting to compare the USB microphone recording level of 7, 8/8.1 and 10 on systems that had the same hardware and exactly the same programs installed. The recording level in 10 is okay, but the sensitivity could do with being upped though.

It's Bing time!

MICROSOFT HAS courted controversy, yet again, by announcing that the Cortana virtual assistant is to become locked to the company's Bing search engine and Edge browser. Both have been set as the default, but there have been ways to circumvent the settings to change Cortana's basis to Chrome and Google, for example. Microsoft has now confirmed that these loopholes will be closed.

Apple locks its people to a single search engine and no one complains but MS does it and you might as well end the world, but given you can use a metric crapton of other browsers it aint exactly the end of the world.

I don't think Apple does - although do limit the selection to just a few on iOS Safari (Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo. Anyway it's not a big deal as Cortana is an optional feature and not an essential. As you say, plenty of browsers available.

Siri uses Bing. No choice.

Ahh yes. I see what Maxatoria meant now. Google Now uses Google and Amazon's Alexa uses Bing.

I completely forgot to say in the above post that I was using the Windows 10 upgrade (Media Creation Tool) when experimenting with the microphone. I was actually talking about the upgrade when making that post but completely forgot to mention it. I can't see a clean install being much different though. I dunno, I might be surprised. So yes, the upgrade might be the problem.

I've hardly used Cortana anyway. I use Google 97% of the time and Bing the very odd time, just to see how good it is at giving the best search results. Google's always won so far.

You are missing my point - Windows 10 is not responsible for 3rd party drivers. So Windoiws 10 may be fine but that the drivers from the manufacturer are at fault. Have you checked that you are using the latest sound/mic drivers from their website etc.

Maybe. I keep getting the very odd 1-2 seconds black screen the very odd time every day. There is no downloadable microphone driver for the external microphone that I have. I have the latest sound card driver. Something I just tried seemed to allow me to have the microphone recording level at 100% (I had to have the level at 95% because there were random low static noises at 100%) and it was going into device manager and updating the driver for the microphone from a list. Anyway, now I'm left with the problem of the very odd 1-2 seconds black screen every day. If I get another one, I'm going back to 8.1 until I get Windows 10 on USB. This is the first operating system upgrade that I've had because all others have been either clean installs or have already been on. I've not had any problems with any Windows operating systems until now.

Okay, I've chosen the driver for the microphone in Device Manager that was from 2014 and the spark/static noises can't be heard, or you have to really listen closely to hear them. If I see any more black screens, I'll just install the older/previous graphics driver which worked absolutely fine. These drivers that Windows 10 is getting for me seem buggy.

http://www.winbeta.org/news/get-wind...ree-offer-ends

On July 29th the Get Windows 10 app that facilitates the easy upgrade to Windows 10 will be disabled and eventually removed from PCs worldwide. Just as it took time to ramp up and roll out the Get Windows 10 app, it will take time to ramp it down.

5000/1 MS decide to can Windows 10 entirely and embrace OSX.

Nah - bookies would never give such stupid odds on anything !

For those who were wondering, the Windows 10 upgrade will not be free after July 29th:
http://www.alphr.com/microsoft/10033...s-a-cash-value