Hello, everyone. Not really a problem, just a seeming oddity that I'm curious to get more information on.

I just switched out my corded optical mouse for a wireless optical one-- I'm pretty sure there was a break somewhere in the cord, because when Alt-dragging windows they had a tendency to jump all over the screen. The problem is gone with the wireless (which I knew would be the case, having switched back & forth between these mice before), but I'm noticing something else: I may be crazy, but it seems like X is a heck of a lot more responsive since the switch. Specifically, it seems to to refreshing more quickly, as I'm seeing much less "ghosting" as one window moves over another (old processor, modest RAM, off-the-shelf graphics, so a little ghosting is inevitable).

Could a gimpy mouse really have accounted for the (apparently) weaker video performance I used to see? I can understand where a wire break would have caused the jump-while-dragging issue; but can signals from a mouse really cause an overall slowdown? Or am I just nuts?

[Incidentally, I don't know how much of a role the mouse driver might have played; I can say that I didn't make any changes to it.]

Sorry to post such a non-issue, but I'm scientifically-inclined and insatiably curious; I'm all about causation & correlation. Thanks!

If I'm not mistaken, different optical mouses have different "framerates" at which they take pictures to determine how fast you're moving the mouse and which direction. It's possible that your new mouse has a higher framerate.

Also - I'm not sure about the new mouses - but the old ones used to require your PC to do some of its work - it would just send your PC raw data and let your PC figure out how fast you moved the mouse, what direction, etc. I remember that, for a while, when optical mice first came out, everyone said that you shouldn't buy one unless you've got a pretty fast computer (that was back when 500mHz was blazing fast, though) and/or don't plan to use your PC for anything system-intensive, such as gaming. Maybe the new mouses actually do this processing inside, which takes some load off the processor. This would explain your speed increase.

Ah! That explains quite a bit. Thanks!

Whatever the specific cause might be, and whether or not the mouse actually had anything to do with it, the improvement in my GUI performance is real. There have been times, under heavy loads, when the windows of some applications have been painfully slow to refresh; it's nowehere near as bad now.

I guess I never considered that there might be such a thing as "smart" mice. Now I know.


Thanks again.

No problem

I'm guessing by "smart" you're referring to the fact that the processing is done inside the mouse?

Actually, "smart" mouses have been around for a LOOOOOONG time - WAY before optical mouses were invented. Back with the old (2/3/4)86 PCs, it was fairly common to have a mouse that did its own processing because, with such limited CPU power and memory, and Windows and whatever apps taking memory, the computer probably would slow down noticeably if it had to process this info - so many (if not all) mice from the earlier days of computing processed their own data and left little for the computer to do. They were expensive, but that little extra boost was much-needed back then.

These mouses are still available - in growing numbers and for fairly low prices, I believe - and really run circles around "dumb" mouses (even the old ones, if you don't mind having to clean the ball). Today the ones that are REALLY high quality and have REALLY fast CPUs are often called "gaming" or "expert" mice. Of course, if you don't wanna pay the high prices, you can probably still find lower-quality "smart" mice for pretty cheap - probably $20, maybe less nowadays - processors are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time.