Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
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Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
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Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#2Further, when installing, it would hang at some point without any sign of a prompt but would instantly continue if the mouse were moved. You could easily test this - turn your mouse upside-down during install and wait (to avoid any incidental mouse motion due to desk vibration etc).
Told my IT friend who was loading my machine and he said "you're confused; I've installed hundreds of times and never seen that". So I turned his mouse upside down and waited. Voila! It hung.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#3Here I was thinking this was some sort of urban myth caused by superstitions in an age with less abundance of easily accessible tech information.
Guess I owe my dad an apology now.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#4Here I was thinking this was some sort of urban myth caused by superstitions in an age with less abundance of easily accessible tech information. Guess I owe my dad an apology now.
It looks like you're not the only one! From the comments on the top response:
> "If true, I owe some baby boomers apologies for things I said about 20 years ago"
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#5Here I was thinking this was some sort of urban myth caused by superstitions in an age with less abundance of easily accessible tech information. Guess I owe my dad an apology now.
Call him and tell him!
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#6This reminds me of using NUM LOCK to see if your CPU was responding to the A20 interrupt.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#7I remember when I was a kid that I used this "hack" to speed up installations.
If I moved the mouse the HDD would spin furiously but once the mouse stopped it would resume trickling the writes/reads again.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#8Reminds me of https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#9noice, did not know that! Maybe I should give Win95 a go, as macOS is going pretty down.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#10In order to show the properly random and non-deterministic behavior (e.g. random BSODs) that Windows users have come to expect, MS Windows needs to continuously gather high-quality entropy from its surrounding environment. That's why it stops when you're not wiggling the mouse; it's just waiting for you to provide the additional entropy it needs.