Hi,

I've recently built a new machine with the following specs:
2Gb RAM
64 bit dual core AMD 3800+ chip
SATA-II hard disk
NVIDIA 7600GT card

I would think with my system specs, KDE (the desktop environment I use) would be very responsive and smooth. I've just installed Suse 10.1 and I'm slightly disappointed that my mouse cursor still becomes sluggish briefly when I'm using applications sometimes. By this, I mean I can be moving the mouse smoothly across the screen and all of a sudden it won't update for a fraction of a second and then jump forward. I would have thought that the two CPU cores would mean I would always have enough CPU power to keep the GUI responsive.

As far as I know, I have the proprietary nvidia drivers installed, the SMP 64-bit kernel installed, DMA on, loads of free memory etc. so I don't see why I should be experiencing this. I have tried renicing X to -15, but it doesn't make much difference. Does anyone have any ideas of what I could try or how I can identify the cause?

It's quite hard to pin down exactly when the mouse cursor lags. The zmd (Suse updater) process was running at 100% on one core earlier on startup and that made my mouse sluggish. I just launched GIMP and the mouse was lagging during the first load but not the second time I loaded it (which makes me think DMA isn't enabled properly, but I'm very sure that it is).

Does nobody have any suggestions at all?

Sounds linked to hard disk activity, so I'd suspect either bad default BIOS settings or a SATA driver problem.

Any hints on how I could confirm this is the problem and how I could go about fixing it?

I don't know if this makes a difference, but this is the results of "hdparm -tT /dev/sda" for my disk:

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 2612 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1307.23 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 180 MB in 3.00 seconds = 59.94 MB/sec