You're right to be suspicious of those third-party applications: many of those custom cursor packages are actually spyware or worse, and I never recommend that anyone download and install anything in that category.

The good news is that you don't need to worry about anything like that because WinXP actually has some nice features included that will greatly alleviate your problem.

To get to them, you'll want to click on START --> Control Panels, then click on Mouse. Now you'll see this:

Click on the "Pointer Options" tab first of all, and you'll see this:

As you can see, there are three visibility options you can select: I find that the "pointer trails" is darn annoying, personally, but the "show location of pointer" when you press the Control button feature is pretty cool. Try both of them, see what you think.

But wait! There's more! Click on the Pointers tab too:

There are actually a surprising number of different Schemes here, but I suggest that you try either "Windows Standard (large)" or "Windows Standard (extra large)" as alternatives. The pointers will all look the same, they'll just be bigger.

Anyway, between those different options, I bet you can find your cursor a lot faster on your new Windows laptop!