The “Enhance Pointer Precision” setting in Windows can actually make you less precise with your mouse in many situations. This poorly understood feature is enabled by default in Windows, and is a form of mouse acceleration.
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What Does Enhance Pointer Precision Do?
Normally, the only thing that controls the distance your mouse cursor moves on the screen is how far you physically move your mouse. The relationship between the two is controlled by the “dots per inch” (DPI) setting. A higher DPI means your cursor moves farther when you move the mouse the same distance.
Enhance Pointer Precision is basically a type of mouse acceleration. With this setting enabled, Windows monitors how fast you move your mouse and essentially adjusts your DPI on the fly. When you move the mouse faster, the DPI increases and your cursor moves a longer distance. When you move it slower, the DPI decreases and your cursor moves a shorter distance.
In other words, Enhance Pointer Precision makes the speed you move your mouse matter. Without this feature enabled, you could move your mouse an inch and your cursor would always move the same distance on the screen, no matter how fast you moved the mouse. With Enhance Pointer Precision enabled, your cursor would travel a smaller distance if you moved your mouse more slowly, and a greater distance if you moved your mouse more quickly—even when moving your mouse the exact same distance.
Why Enhance Pointer Precision Is Enabled By Default
This feature is enabled by default in Windows because it’s useful in many situations.
For example, let’s say you’re using a PC in an office and you have a cheap $5 mouse. The mouse doesn’t have a very good sensor and is limited to a fairly low DPI setting. Without Enhance Pointer Precision, you may need to move the mouse a longer distance to move it from one side of the screen to another. With Enhance Pointer Precision, you can move the mouse more quickly to move it from one side of the screen to another without moving it a greater distance. You can also move the mouse more slowly than normal to gain better accuracy when precisely moving the mouse small distances.
This can also be particularly useful on laptop touchpads, allowing you to move your finger more quickly on the touchpad to move the mouse cursor a greater distance without dragging your finger all the way to the other side of the touchpad.
Is Enhance Pointer Precision Good, or Is It Bad?
Whether this setting is actually helpful depends on your mouse hardware and what you’re doing.
One problem is that the acceleration produced by Enhance Pointer Precision isn’t a perfectly linear increase, so it’s hard to predict. Move your mouse a tiny bit faster…
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