No mouse cursor on Win 8 slave with no mouse

[niagarasystems]

I swapped out one of my slave systems with a Windows 8 PC and do not have a mouse connected to it. Because of that, there's no mouse cursor when my mouse slides over to it. The mouse works and some items are highlighted when the mouse cursor hovers over it, but I don't get a mouse cursor. 

Does anyone know how I can force a mouse cursor on a Windows 8 system that doesn't have a mouse connected to it? 

[Frank]

I had the same problem.  The only workaround for me is to keep a mouse permanently connected to my slave PC even though I never use it. I keep it out of the way under my desk on top of the slave CPU.  Also, if both my Pc's are powered down, I find that I need to power on the master PC first and make sure it is logged into windows before the slave PC is fully booted up. hth 

[niagarasystems]

Well! I found an ironic solution...

I googled a few keywords in Chrome so I could bring up this post quicker than actually going to the Input Director web site and I happened upon a post in this forum that had a clever idea to turn on mouse keys so you could control the mouse with your arrow keys; turns out this also 'enables' the mouse cursor for regular mouse control with Input Director

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/input-director/cO4LH8UjxFc

This solution would be great on the FAQ page for others that do not want to plug in a mouse. 

Here's how to enable in Windows 7 - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows7/use-mouse-keys-to-move-the-mouse-pointer

[Maxim Bange]

Great Idea...! ..never tried it because I thought I would lose some keyboard functionality.., I thought of it as a trade of sort.. HOWEVER.. there is combination that prevents (of course there is :-P )the keyboard accidentally being used as mouse!..
ALT + left SHIFT + NUM LOCK is standard Windows as far as I know :-)

[Bryan Mahan]

Thanks! This happened to me on Windows 10 and plugging in a spare mouse solved the issue. Now I just get an annoying spinning circle in the middle of the screen when i'm not on that PC.

[kol...@bintegratedtech.com]

I found this to work as well. Finally a use for that bag of unknown mouse receivers. lol

[Filipe Dias]

Brilliant ideia @ 2019, it would never cross my mind :)
I was going nuts over why, of a sudden, I had lost the damn thing.
Thanks a million!