Mouse Acceleration in Windows: What is It and How Can You Turn it Off? 

So, you have started the game and you realize that with every move of the mouse that you make, you have journeyed farther than you want to move and your characters are not exactly behaving the way that you intended them to based on the movement of the cursor. Something has to be wrong with the game, right? Not necessarily. It is most likely that what you are experiencing is what is called the mouse acceleration.

While this may seem as just another trivial thing, it is one thing that can completely ruin your gaming experience or even frustrate the work you are trying to do because it literally forces you to move faster than your shadow since with every move you make, you find yourself in a place farther than you had actually wanted.

The thing to understand, however, is that mouse acceleration may not be a bad thing for some people as it has its advantages but for some, it can be what frustration is all about. Before looking at how you can turn it off, let’s look at what exactly it is and the advantages and disadvantages it has. On the other hand, a combination of both accelerations (positive and negative mouse acceleration) is a situation that unless you move your mouse with speed, the cursor will not move.

What is Mouse Acceleration?

In very simple terms, mouse acceleration is simply a setting that brings to a correlation the movement of your mouse and the distance covered by your cursor. This essentially means that your the speed of the movement of your mouse will get your cursor to travel faster and farther on the screen.

Sometimes referred to as cursor acceleration, this can be caused by a number of things including the setting of the game you are playing, the operating system of your computer, sensor property on the mouse hardware, as well as mouse driver.

There are different types of mouse or cursor acceleration; the positive acceleration, negative acceleration, and a combination of both negative and positive. While the positive has to do with your mouse pointer travelling farther with a faster movement of the mouse, the negative acceleration is the exact opposite meaning that the faster your mouse moves, the less distance your cursor get to cover. There is hardly a situation where you will experience the third type of acceleration.

Advantages

As earlier pointed out, it is not necessary that mouse acceleration is a bad thing and you can find people that even go on to activate it themselves. One of the advantages it has is to allow for more mouse movement on the screen for someone who doesn’t have a large space on his computer desk to be moving the mouse. With this, every little movement you make with the mouse can help you cover a lot of distance.

Disadvantages

  • The major disadvantage of mouse acceleration is that replicating specific movement in gaming can be very hard or almost impossible this is because of the inconsistency that it comes with.
  • In addition to this, accuracy can also be a major source of concern for someone playing games that need accuracy most especially first-person shooter games. This is because aiming something fast and accurately may not always work together when you have the mouse acceleration.
  • The first disadvantage of using the cursor acceleration is that it is very hard to achieve a proper setting that will work for you in a particular game and one that you can become used to. This is because you will hardly be able to know at what movement you will achieve what distance, so you will need to keep tweaking until you get what works for you.

How Can You Turn it Off in Windows? 

Mouse Acceleration

Turning off mouse acceleration on Windows 7 and 8 is slightly different from turning it off on Windows 10, therefore I will provide a guide for turning in off on the different windows.

Windows 7 and 8

  • Go to your Control Panel and then click on Appearance and Personalization.
  • Select Display and then Advanced Setting.
  • Select the Troubleshoot tab at the top right corner
  • The mouse acceleration can be adjusted using the Hardware Acceleration that you will see here. You can turn it down completely to the left in order to turn it off or move it the other way if you want to increase it.
  • Once that is done, simply click on Apply and then OK.
  • To have the changes activated, you will need to restart your computer.

Windows 10

  • Just as it is with turning the mouse acceleration in Windows 7 and 8, in Windows 10, the first thing to do is to go to the Control Panel of your computer.
  • The next thing to do is to select Hardware and Sound
  • You will see Device and Printers. Under it, select the Mouse option
  • A Mouse Properties box will appear. Click on Pointer Options
  • The first thing that you will see is Motion
  • You will see Select a pointer speed. Under it, uncheck the box that has the Enhance pointer precision
  • Click on Apply and then Okay.

Following the steps above, you will be able to turn off the mouse acceleration for both Windows 7 and 8 as well as Windows 10 respectively. Once you are able to do that, the mouse movement on the screen will move at the same speed with the movement of your hand.

But at the end of the day, since it also has its own advantages, one can decide to set the mouse acceleration. If you are in this class, following the same steps will allow you to set, increase, or decrease the acceleration to the exact level that you need.

See Also: Optical vs Laser Mouse: Which Is Better For Gaming? [Simple Answer] 

Finally, if you do not want it, you may need to be checking the mouse acceleration for most games most especially FPS games since as stated above, some of the time, the reason why you get the acceleration is that it is a part of the in-game setting. Hence, you will need to check it before going deep into the game by launching it and try moving your mouse in different speeds and distance to see what you get.

Tim Flaherty
Tim Flaherty
Tim is our talented senior tech writer and editor, the one who plays music on replay, drinks more coffee than beer, plays video games, and reads poetry. In between, Tim reviews products, write about computers, games, hardware, software, guides, reviews and talk tech and arts. If there is a WWIII, he thinks it could be caused by bad writing.

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