I recently noticed that my mouse pointer would flicker every few seconds showing the little blue circle to the right. Nothing was broken but I get wound up by silly things like this and I wanted to make it stop.

After a bit of research on the net (most of which was to do with an HP issue with laptop mousepads) and some experimentation I found that the culprit was Chrome and Gmail. By default Gmail will display a list of people you can start a Google “Chat” with on the left of the browser page. Go into the Gmail settings and turn off the chat option and the flickering cursor stops flickering. The list of people to chat to isn’t shown any more but I rarely use Google Chat so that isn’t a problem for me. If I do use it in future I will just switch the option back on again.

This has solved another issue for me as well. I have a laptop with a touch screen and when I load Gmail on that, it detects the touch screen and stops the mailbox list expanding when you hover the mouse over it. You have to click on “more” at the bottom of the list to expand it. I tried switching off the touch screen detect in Chrome but that didn’t work. With Google Chat disabled the list of people doesn’t display so I now see my full mailbox list. Result!