Juddering mouse with RH9 on Inspiron 8200
 

Hi All,

Having a little trouble with my Inspiron 8200 since upgrading to the 2.6 kernel. Well, actually there was quite a bit of trouble, but one solution still eludes me. The symptoms are sporadic momentary freezing of the system, lasting only a fraction of a second but affecting everything.

It's best described as a split-second of lost motion when dragging your mouse around in a circle - the machine literally appears to freeze for about .3 seconds. This happens (very) approximately 5 times a minute and you also notice it when typing, with the keys that were hit during the 'freeze' appearing all at once just afterwards. Obviously this makes operating the machine quite tricky, especially in dialogue boxes where the buttons are close together.

The machine is a Dell Inspiron 8200;
Pentium 4M 2.0GHz,
ATI Radeon 9000 Mobile 64M,
512Mb RAM,
ACX100 wireless card.

I'd be really grateful for any clues you guys could give me on this as I'm stumped. Still a bit of a newbie when it comes to Linux, but I figured that since I got 2.6 installed with only one 'failed' message on start-up I'm not too new to ask this one. :)

Many thanks in advance!

Mark (aka Muppet)

Re: Juddering mouse with RH9 on Inspiron 8200
 

IF you loaded the ATI driver from ATI.com support you need to load it again. Also... what distro is this?

Re: Re: Juddering mouse with RH9 on Inspiron 8200
 

Sorry, forgot to say - it's RedHat 9. I looked at the ATI site for an updated Linux driver, but they don't do drivers for laptops anymore, instead they redirect you to a universal response of 'contact your machine supplier' or some such stuff.

So I tried to select another similar driver in the Display Settings box and restarted the XServer, but the results are the same. FWIW I don't think it's a graphics driver problem, just doesn't feel right. More like an IRQ thing, but I just can't put my finger on it ...

Thanks!

Mup.

I think I may have figured it out!

I started using Ksim to see what the CPU was doing while I'm using the machine, and found regular spikes to 100% usage every 20 seconds.

So I ran 'top' and found that every so often 'kdeinit' would jump up with a pid of 4045. 'ps 4045' told me it was the Klaptop applet, and looking at the properties told me it was set to poll the system every 20 seconds.

Changing this to 10 seconds doubled the frequency of my CPU spikes (and the 'juddering') and killing it altogether has made my machine smooth again.

Hooray! :o)

Mup.