Issue

Sony VAIO laptop keeps displaying spinning circle mouse pointer. This happens every 10-15 seconds and lasts 5 seconds or so.

Cause

This doesn’t seem to affect computer performance too much, but it could be because was a a hi-spec Core i7 + SSD laptop. Task Manager didn’t provide many clues – none of the processes was consuming unusually large chunk of system resources.

Diagnosing was done by disabling and re-enabling application from running on start-up via Sysinternals Autoruns until the offending application was found.

The issue was caused by HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 software running on start-up.

Solution

Preventing HP Officejet Pro 8600 (NET) from running on start-up resolved the issue. This disables ability to automatically initiate scan from the printer, but doesn’t affect printing or scanning when initiated from the computer.

HP seem to be aware about the problem. Their solution at the moment is to simply disable Scan to Computer functionality – not really something you would expect…