I used to open the CD drive when the entire computer would freeze up. I wonder if its the same thing.
I totally forgot about that! I did it, too. It's like it jarred it back into interactivity.
Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
161–170 of 201 posts
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#162Ah, the operant conditioning of software. To this day, when waiting for some long or compute-intensive operation, I tend to instinctively move the mouse around. I guess this may be why. Ironically, even though I grew up on Windows, I don't remember any actual case of "moving the mouse speeds thing up" on this OS - I only remember the infamous Linux cases (mouse move regenerates entropy, unblocking processes that got…
Likewise because of Amiga workplace terminal emulator. Applications that constantly output to stdout would go faster if you kept the mouse moving.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#163From 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…
This applies to Macs as well. Or at least it used to, in some situations — now that I think about it, I can't really recall the last time I did that. The standard behaviour now seems to be scrolling faster the farther the mouse is from the edge of the pane (which is clearly a deliberate, and useful, UI decision).
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#164Here 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.
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.
On that subject, don't make fun of people who paste screenshots into Word docs and email them. On Windows 95, that was a really good idea!
MS Word was one of the few ubiquitous tools that would compress images, and certainly one of the few that people could be counted on to know. MS Paint didn't support PNG until Win98, and even then wouldn't do it by default.
If you didn't go via Word, chances are you'd be emailing a 900kB BMP at a time when people used 28.8k modems to access Hotmail accounts with 2MB caps.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#165This wasn't just restricted to COM port based I/O either. Back then I had a Logitech bus mouse. The mouse was connected directly to an ISA card, and didn't use the COM ports as most mice did back then. (I needed the extra COM port/IRQ for my modems.) 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 fo…
Get off my lawn! But what newbies will bever know the heck of: dip switch settings for IRQ for modems. Thats what literally got me into computers... In order to dial up BBSs and play tthe Pit and dl warez. —- Ive told this story before, but in about 1992? Or so - i got grounded for a month because i had been calling in long distance to a bbs in san jose to play the pit - and racked up a long distance bill of $926 - m…
> But what newbies will bever know the heck of: dip switch settings for IRQ for modems.
And dip switches to set hard drives to primary/secondary. Get that wrong and your machine didn’t boot.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
True! I know some of the people involved in the windows update bar. Since cpu and dusk are so different across devices it’s hard to know actual time it will take. Instead teams divided their packages into theoretical weights and the progress bar showed the percent of total “weights”. That’s why it can be choppy is packages with few subdivisions have little to interpolate.
Progress indicators that moving perfectly and steadily are probably time based, but I'd have thought they've always been work based. Example: you know you have to copy 20GB across the network; update the progress bar with 'percent of data complete' periodically (on a timer, in the byte copying loop, whatever.) I've seen dual progress bars: one for "overall progress" (each one of five tasks fills this bar 20%) and one…
I've written progress bars that combine all of the above. Each sub-task had a weight though, and adaptive interpolation was used to animate the progress bar between chunky updates from less granular tasks based on how far they usually increment over which time interval.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#167Reminds me of https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233
As a matter of fact, I think he actually answered the question:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=36423
“One danger of the MsgWaitForMultipleObjects function is calling it when there are already messages waiting to be processed, because MsgWaitForMultipleObjects returns only when there is a new event in the queue.“
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#168Earlier 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.
On that subject, don't make fun of people who paste screenshots into Word docs and email them. On Windows 95, that was a really good idea! MS Word was one of the few ubiquitous tools that would compress images, and certainly one of the few that people could be counted on to know. MS Paint didn't support PNG until Win98, and even then wouldn't do it by default. If you didn't go via Word, chances are you'd be emailing…
Also, MSPaint on Windows XP adds ".PNG" extension in uppercase which is also annoying.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#169From 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.
I think it is not acceleration, but rather a position of mouse relative to the edge of a window.
Re: Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
to be fair, "actual progress" is almost always a misnomer anyway.
True! I know some of the people involved in the windows update bar. Since cpu and dusk are so different across devices it’s hard to know actual time it will take. Instead teams divided their packages into theoretical weights and the progress bar showed the percent of total “weights”. That’s why it can be choppy is packages with few subdivisions have little to interpolate.
With a process that happens on regular intervals like a Windows Update, I always wondered why the system doesn't store metrics on how long the process has historically taken on previous runs, and then just uses a weighted average of historical times as a time-based total estimate, converted into a divisor for work-based progress estimates (i.e. if previous runs took 60 minutes on average, then progress at 25% would say "45 minutes remaining", then if it suddenly jumped to 50% would immediately say "30 minutes remaining." Even if they're choppy, those time estimates would actually be correct if you sampled and averaged them.)