Sometimes the mouse pointer is nice and agile, and sometimes it slows down tremendously or sticks, taking a big sweeping motion just to get it the last centimeter so it passes over a field or button where i want it. Sometimes it decided i've clicked when i haven't, other times i have to click 2 or 3 times.
The mouse is wireless and its batteries are good. I've tried with a different mouse but the problem persists. I also have a Wacom Bamboo tablet and i switch back and forth, partially just to try to keep working when it is annoying me this way. The tablet doesn't display this behaviour, only the mouse. I tried unplugging the tablet to see if it would help, it makes no difference.
The system is brand new and it is also a fresh install of 64-bit 14.04. This behaviour has happened with every install of Ubuntu, and also happened on my old system, which shared no components with this one other than the tablet and the hard drives. So I presume this has to do with the tablet. It is a Bamboo Capture Pen & Touch, CTH-470. I am a novice to Linux, I'm afraid. How should I go about fixing this?
Edit: After looking around a bit, in this answer it talked about using System Monitor to find out what is using CPU resources. This answer talked about compiz causing mouse lag. So I opened the system monitor, found compiz, and am checking what %CPU it is taking. I just moved the browser window and it jumped to 18%. As I'm typing it is fluctuating between 2 and 5%. I have a lot of browser tabs open right now, and a window with Blender in the background, partly in an effort to load up the system and find the issue. Just moving the mouse around is causing Compiz to spike at 6 to 8%.
Also, at the bottom of the comments on this question, the asker mentions that moving the mouse to a 'super USB', which I took to be a USB 3.0 port, their mouse issues ceased. I have also done that. For a while that seemed to help, but now the mouse is once again sticking and jumping. There seems to be a correlation to how long the computer has been on, and how bad it is, and also it seems to get worse over or near buttons and fields. But then it works fine again for a while.
My system has a Haswell i7, 16 GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 960. It's built for graphics work, which makes this problem that much more annoying.
Output of lspci -k | grep -EA2 'VGA|3d' is
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 1401 (rev a1)
Subsystem: eVga.com. Corp. Device 3966
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation Device 0fba (rev a1)
Output of xinput; dmesg | grep pnp
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0 id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0 id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pen stylus id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Finger touch id=14 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:400d id=15 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Pen eraser id=16 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Finger pad id=17 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Microsoft LifeCam id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Microsoft Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0 id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
[ 0.244494] pnp: PnP ACPI init
[ 0.244630] pnp 00:02: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0b00 (active)
[ 0.244811] pnp 00:05: [dma 0 disabled]
[ 0.244835] pnp 00:05: Plug and Play ACPI device, IDs PNP0501 (active)
[ 0.245144] pnp: PnP ACPI: found 8 devices
I am using a Microsoft mouse right now. An Acer mouse was previously connected to it.
lspci -k | grep -EA2 'VGA|3D'terminal command. – Pilot6 Sep 19 '15 at 17:11xinput; dmesg | grep pnpterminal command. – Pilot6 Sep 20 '15 at 08:21