Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Erratic mouse movement in VMware Workstation on a second screen

I heavily rely on VMware workstation for running all flavours of OS's (from Linux to older Windows versions, and there might even be a MacOSX for iOS development running somewhere, maybe). After upgrading to Windows 10 on my new laptop (with a 1080p screen compared to the previous device I was using), I noticed that all of my machines were behaving strange, to the point that basically none of them were useful anymore.

Symptoms:

  • Mouse pointer "flickers" around the screen, when clicking/dragging, the mouse pointer jumps to the upper left corner.
  • This only happens when VMware Workstation is running on the second screen attached to the computer, not on the native screen.
  • It happens on ALL operating systems, Linux, Windows, and perhaps also on Mac OS X.
Been looking around a bit to found out what was causing this behaviour, and it turns out that it is a generic problem with Workstation itself.

Resolution:

Thank you VMware forums, the solution is to disable "Display scaling on high DPI settings" on the vmware.exe in the C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation folder. 

One of those issues that can drive you crazy, have you reinstalling your VM's a dozen of times thinking it is you doing something wrong, etc etc... so hope it helps :).