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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?

#71

Post by shawnz »

blihp wrote: post #68
raxxorrax wrote: post #44

So in today's world... why do so many PCs emit a slight sound when moving the mouse. I know that there are high frequencies involved and periphery is one of the worst perpetrators of electromagnetic interference, but I still find that strange. And what exactly is emitting the sound here?

Generally it's cheap/poorly designed audio amplifier circuits. Even though modern PC audio is mostly digital, the final stage (getting sound out the speaker) is still analog. If the motherboard designer isn't careful about how they place/isolate/ground the analog audio circuitry, it can pick up some of the PC's stray high frequency noise which gets worse the more you turn up the volume since now the noise gets amplif…

They claim the PC is emitting the sound, not their speakers. So they are likely describing coil whine, not interference.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#72

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

butisaidsudo wrote: post #66
air7 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. What a humbling slap-in-the-face, no? Sometimes when an idea sounds silly, and comes from a less technical person, one might disregard it even though it's easily testable/provable.

I love these kind of issues, here are two classics: - Open Office won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161... - Can't send email more than 500 miles: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

One thing about the famous "500 miles" post that I realized doesn't make sense:

----

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units 1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds You want: miles * 558.84719 / 0.0017893979

----

But surely for Sendmail to register a "connect" with a remote SMTP server would require at least one (or many?) round trips to the remote server, so one-way speed of light time doesn't seem like it would really be relevant. Am I missing something?

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#73

Post by giobox »

raxxorrax wrote: post #44

So in today's world... why do so many PCs emit a slight sound when moving the mouse. I know that there are high frequencies involved and periphery is one of the worst perpetrators of electromagnetic interference, but I still find that strange. And what exactly is emitting the sound here?

Could be coil whine? Many modern GPUs are notorious for it.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetically_excited_ac...

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#74

Post by gsich »

Analemma_ wrote: post #64
gsich wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I too witnessed the 'windows is running slow when installing' bug. I often would use the mouse cursor to 'mark' the position of the loading bar (we really are spoiled for speed these days). Most software doesn't feel any faster compared to Windows 95 (see Wirth's law). Also most shitware does not display a loading bar anymore, instead you get some spinning stuff that's just an animation.

> Also most shitware does not display a loading bar anymore, instead you get some spinning stuff that's just an animation. In fairness, that's because users constantly complained about loading bars not being accurate (they'd freeze, change speeds, stop right at the end etc.), but having a "true" loading bar that proceeds smoothly basically requires solving the Halting Problem. So out it went.

Let them complain and ignore it.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#75

Post by kllrnohj »

shawnz wrote: post #42
_trampeltier wrote: post #16

From a comment: Try opening a large file with Notepad on a contemporary machine. The window must not be full screen. When loaded, mark all text using the mouse (the keyboard works as well, it just needs more manual skill). While still holding the button down (and marking) move the mouse down, so the text gets marked and scrolled. Now compare the scroll speed while holding the mouse still versus wiggling it. Depending…

It's not clear that this is caused by the same effect. A commenter suggests that this behaviour is actually due to how mouse acceleration affects scrolling speed which I am more inclined to believe.

Yeah there is no way this has anything to do with the same behavior. What's likely happening is there's a delay in auto-scroll, and by generating new mouse events your triggering manual scrolls at a higher rate (or in addition to?) than auto-scroll.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#76

Post by mywittyname »

butisaidsudo wrote: post #66
air7 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. What a humbling slap-in-the-face, no? Sometimes when an idea sounds silly, and comes from a less technical person, one might disregard it even though it's easily testable/provable.

I love these kind of issues, here are two classics: - Open Office won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161... - Can't send email more than 500 miles: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

That last one is brilliant.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#77

Post by glenneroo »

birdman3131 wrote: post #45
nemo44x wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me back in the day using a file sharing/community program called Caraccho (for Mac) - similar to Hotline. Often people would queue up on someone's server (running of their desktop computer) to download a file since the server admin could set how many concurrent downloads from all users were allowed. Folks would send messages to people saying that if they hit Command-Q it makes the client run in "quick mode" w…

Reminds me of the runescape cheat of alt+f4

I'm confident that the Alt+f4 cheat-code was around before Runescape ;) It was inevitably told to every new member at our LAN parties in the late 90s - the few who knew were often assigned admin duty to diagnose network/PC problems (which were frequent).

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#78

Post by Ecolog »

raxxorrax wrote: post #44

So in today's world... why do so many PCs emit a slight sound when moving the mouse. I know that there are high frequencies involved and periphery is one of the worst perpetrators of electromagnetic interference, but I still find that strange. And what exactly is emitting the sound here?

Similarly I can hear my Kindle buzz when I change page. Electric components can have some coil whine when being pushed

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#79

Post by tempguy9999 »

snarfy wrote: post #28

It's this bit of code: while(GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0) { TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } The mouse isr would cause a loop like this to execute at some point, processing all the messages on the queue. Win95 had preemption, but it ran at 100hz. Moving the mouse caused additional queue processing on top of the time sliced preemption.

I thought the windows clock defaulted to ~60Hz. I understand it could be pushed up by software to 1Khz for audio players to work correctly. I may be very wrong on the latter point though.

Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

#80

Post by the-dude »

achandlerwhite wrote: post #55
cantstop wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that time, it was more like the 75mhz range.

Note he said 100hz not mhz. Essentially 100 times per second the message queue would process but if you moved the mouse it would process faster.

And the BSDs and Linux also have the HZ parameter for scheduling and for a long time the default has been as low as 100 Hz.

Not sure what the current status quo is.

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