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I 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.
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). That way when I would walk-away from an install I could see if the progress meter moved while I was away. More often then not the progress bar would still be where it was when I had left. By moving the mouse activity would return and the installation would continue.
I always assumed it was the graphics that were not being updated. A small bug with the install would keep running but the lack of input interrupts caused the display to get 'stuck'. (That would explain the sudden 'jump' in progress bar movement as soon as I wiggled the mouse.)
This reminds me of using NUM LOCK to see if your CPU was responding to the A20 interrupt.
All these years I've been wrong!
> The effect was quite pronounced; large applications that could take an hour to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input.
It's not just Notepad :-) I do this often, when I have to mark a lot of things.
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 stuck when generating a random number call). But there must have been something, and I must have experienced it early enough in my childhood.
Here 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.
This reminds me of using NUM LOCK to see if your CPU was responding to the A20 interrupt.