Monday, February 12, 2007
Mouse Curosr Jumping Blues
Problem:
Mouse cursor unexpectedly jumps to the edge of the screen.
Reproduction of Problem:
High CPU loads will temporarily cause buffer overruns of the mouse cursor information. This occurs regardless of mouse driver settings for buffer size (up to 300), sampling rate (20-200), and fast initialization (checked or unchecked). I was able to recreate invisible buffer overruns by running two instances of Prime95 software, both with a "Small FFTs" torture test, and checking mouse cursor with small and continual movements. In order to run two instances of Prime95, edit the first shortcut's Target text field for Prime95 to show:
- "C:\Program Files\Prime95\Prime95.exe" -A1
Copy the shortcut and edit the Target to show:
- "C:\Program Files\Prime95\Prime95.exe" -A2
System and Relevant Background Information:
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (SP-2)
- Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical USB and PS/2 compatible, with PS/2 adapter, connected via PS/2 port.
- Microsoft IntelliPoint 6.1 software
- EVGA nForce 680i motherboard
Solution:
Mouse cursor jumping was solved with one simple change: stop using the PS/2 adapter for this native USB mouse. I put my mouse directly on the universal serial bus as opposed to using the PS/2 adapter and viola, no cursor jumping! As a side effect, this also liberated my PC from handling legacy interrupts and therefore improved the responsiveness of Windows' graphical interface as well. The reason I originally connected the mouse as a PS/2 device was to run the this PC with a PS/2-only KVM.
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