I was about to watch a friend's stream in Discord when I clicked on their shared screen. My second monitor, where Discord was open, suddenly became extremely laggy and seemed close to freezing. I couldn't move the cursor across to my other monitor, although I could still use the taskbar and open the Windows menu with the keyboard. The mouse pointer also looked like a split or duplicated I-beam before separating completely. This has happened twice, and both times it occurred after interacting with a Discord stream. The incidents were months apart, so it doesn't happen constantly. Could this be a memory problem, graphics-driver issue, or something more serious such as malware?
3 Answers
Discord can sometimes use a large amount of memory over time, especially when streams or video are involved. Check Task Manager while the problem is happening to see whether Discord or another process is consuming an unusually high amount of RAM. As a test, you could watch streams in Discord through a web browser instead of the desktop app and see whether the behavior returns.
Since this has only happened twice with months between incidents, a persistent memory leak seems less likely, though it’s still worth checking. Reliability Monitor and Task Manager may show whether Windows recorded a display-driver crash or a process using excessive resources. Nothing in the description specifically suggests malware.
I wouldn’t assume malware from this. The cursor artifacting, Discord becoming unresponsive, and the problem affecting monitor movement sound more like the graphics driver or display system temporarily glitching. Try disabling Discord’s Hardware Acceleration settings, including the one related to video or streaming, and update your GPU driver. If the issue began after a driver update, try rolling back instead. You can also press Win + Ctrl + Shift + B when it happens; Windows will reset the graphics driver and the screens may briefly flicker. If that fixes it immediately, a graphics or rendering problem is the likely cause.
That’s reassuring. My antivirus hasn’t detected anything and I haven’t noticed other unusual activity, so I’ll try the hardware acceleration and driver suggestions if it happens again.