Making a huge selection with mouse in LibreOffice spreadsheets even today goes faster if you move the mouse while dragging one endpoint of the selection over the spreadsheet borders which causes the sheet to scroll. Likely the very same cause: there's a timer or other repeating tick to scroll content at a reasonable speed but the sheet is also scrolled when input events wake up the same loop.
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?
#22In 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.
No, it’s actually a little-known feature that allows Win95 to temporarily upclock the CPU during peak loads, using the power generated by vigorous mouse movements.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#23Sometimes the software itself may even just be designed that way too. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Hidden-Tax-Moves
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#24Making a huge selection with mouse in LibreOffice spreadsheets even today goes faster if you move the mouse while dragging one endpoint of the selection over the spreadsheet borders which causes the sheet to scroll. Likely the very same cause: there's a timer or other repeating tick to scroll content at a reasonable speed but the sheet is also scrolled when input events wake up the same loop.
The same is true in MS Word and even in many web browsers.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#25Making a huge selection with mouse in LibreOffice spreadsheets even today goes faster if you move the mouse while dragging one endpoint of the selection over the spreadsheet borders which causes the sheet to scroll. Likely the very same cause: there's a timer or other repeating tick to scroll content at a reasonable speed but the sheet is also scrolled when input events wake up the same loop.
I remember this with any selection in windows on at least 3.1/95/98/SE.
This happened if you kept the mouse just inside the window and moved it about 10-20px up and down in/out pf the window in the direction of the selection.
It was a way for me to scroll faster than with the wheel or cursors on web pages if you selected some text and then kept the selection on the end of the screen and moved the mouse wildly in the edge of the screen.
As I was younger then, there was probably a better solution to do this but I was not aware of it.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#26Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#27Rather than being interrupt driven (CPU interrupts), it was event driven.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#28It's this bit of code:
while(GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0)
{
TranslateMessage(&msg);
DispatchMessage(&msg);
}
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#29This reminds me of using NUM LOCK to see if your CPU was responding to the A20 interrupt.
Isn’t the use of the lock buttons, like, the standard way to test whether the OS/hardware still responds to something or if it’s reboot time?
They’re soft now. It might indicate your usb driver is wedged, not if your CPU is responding to interrupts at all.
This is a problem for NTP developers - finding real serial ports on modern hardware