33 ms·

Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

1188 points by folli 7y ago

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Further, when installing, it would hang at some point without any sign of a prompt but would instantly continue if the mouse were moved. You could easily test this - turn your mouse upside-down during install and wait (to avoid any incidental mouse motion due to desk vibration etc). Told my IT friend who was loading my machine and he said "you're confused; I've installed hundreds of times and never seen that". So I turned his mouse upside down and waited. Voila! It hung.
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  I recall quite a few times having to send a message to the message queue in code I'd written for this reason. I forget why though - someone can probably remind me, if I didn't send a message it would just stop.
FillardMillmore 7y ago
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.
- gibspaulding 7y ago
  It looks like you're not the only one! From the comments on the top response: > "If true, I owe some baby boomers apologies for things I said about 20 years ago"
- mrzool 7y ago
  Call him and tell him!
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    That's sweet. It will make his day.
- mat_jack1 7y ago
  I'm in your situation, I'm so impressed!
- air7 7y ago
  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.
  - butisaidsudo 7y ago
    I love these kind of issues, here are two classics: - Open Office won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161/comments/28 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161... - Can't send email more than 500 miles: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
    - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
      One thing about the famous "500 miles" post that I realized doesn't make sense: ---- An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays. Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell: $ units 1311 units, 63 prefixes You have: 3 millilightseconds You want: miles * 558.84719 / 0.0017893979 ---- But surely for Sendmail to register a "connect" with a remote SMTP server would require at least one (or many?) round trips to the remote server, so one-way speed of light time doesn't seem like it would really be relevant. Am I missing something?
      - NateEag 7y ago
        Possibly the introduction wherein the author says: "The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining." If memory serves he goes into further detail about the alterations and some common objections to the story in his FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
- matthoiland 7y ago
  I just send my dad an apology as well.
RyJones 7y ago
This reminds me of using NUM LOCK to see if your CPU was responding to the A20 interrupt.
- UI_at_80x24 7y ago
  Are you telling me that's not the correct way to find out? All these years I've been wrong!
  - RyJones 7y ago
    Not at all! If it works, do it!
- Sharlin 7y ago
  Isn’t the use of the lock buttons, like, the standard way to test whether the OS/hardware still responds to something or if it’s reboot time?
  - RyJones 7y ago
    They’re soft now. It might indicate your usb driver is wedged, not if your CPU is responding to interrupts at all. This is a problem for NTP developers - finding real serial ports on modern hardware
    - toast0 7y ago
      The keyboard lights have always been soft. There are certainly more layers now between a keyboard and an os though.
      - myself248 7y ago
        The softness is precisely what made them a useful check, though. Tapping num lock has two important properties: Nothing should ever be blocking that process, and it's harmless to do and should never really affect what's happening.
- 7y ago
Tade0 7y ago
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.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  "large applications that could take an hour to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input."
kabwj 7y ago
Reminds me of https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233
- DCoder 7y ago
  Raymond Chen's blog is always a great source of interesting information. But I remember the times when that blog didn't look like a webdesign internship project in progress. And there were interesting comments…
  - omnibrain 7y ago
    So much history was lost when microsoft migrated the blogs and deleted the comments...
- rwbaskette 7y ago
  As a matter of fact, I think he actually answered the question: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=36423 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.“
geniium 7y ago
noice, did not know that! Maybe I should give Win95 a go, as macOS is going pretty down.
0815test 7y ago
In order to show the properly random and non-deterministic behavior (e.g. random BSODs) that Windows users have come to expect, MS Windows needs to continuously gather high-quality entropy from its surrounding environment. That's why it stops when you're not wiggling the mouse; it's just waiting for you to provide the additional entropy it needs.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  No, it’s actually a little-known feature that allows Win95 to temporarily upclock the CPU during peak loads, using the power generated by vigorous mouse movements.
sansnomme 7y ago
Can flushing buffers be considered a cache invalidation problem?
UI_at_80x24 7y ago
This 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 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.)
- samstave 7y ago
  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 - my dad was livid. He yelled at me and said “why are you wasting all this time with computers! Its never going to do anything for you!” Years later after i became successful with yee olde computerz! He apologized to me and said “im sorry i yelled at you for that time you cost me all that money in long distance charges.”
  - chasingthewind 7y ago
    I also got yelled at by my dad for racking up long distance charges in 1991 or 92 but in my case it was only about $150 for calling the Sierra BBS to download stuff for King's Quest games or something :)
    - samstave 7y ago
      Wonderful! Were you also calling into PCLink? I used to have a challenge with my best friend at the time: We used to call 411 and challenge to whom could keep the 411 operator on the phone longest.
hwj 7y ago
From the answer on Stack Exchange: > The effect was quite pronounced; large applications that could take an hour to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input.
_trampeltier 7y ago
From 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 on your machine the speed up can be several times faster. It's not just Notepad :-) I do this often, when I have to mark a lot of things.
- metalchianti 7y ago
  Strange but mine doesn't scroll UNLESS I move the mouse. I wonder if this is because I have the "Adjust for best performance" option set?
- shawnz 7y ago
  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.
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    Yeah there is no way this has anything to do with the same behavior. What's likely happening is there's a delay in auto-scroll, and by generating new mouse events your triggering manual scrolls at a higher rate (or in addition to?) than auto-scroll.
  - codedokode 7y ago
    I think it is not acceleration, but rather a position of mouse relative to the edge of a window.
- dTal 7y ago
  I think you'll find that Shift + Page Down is the fastest way to mark a lot of text, since you're doing it page by page instead of character by character.
itissid 7y ago
Its like rage shake for mouse! If you are angry and shake your mouse in rage it moves things faster. I imagine this would be a very satisfying thing to be able to do.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Ah, 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 stuck when generating a random number call). But there must have been something, and I must have experienced it early enough in my childhood.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  While running emacs over a modem to arpanet or dialup, I got into the habit of regularly typing ^A ^E to pace my cursor back and forth across the current line, to keep the connection and emacs warm. (Like a caged leopard or mad scientist pacing back and forth.) I could feel how responsive the connection and emacs were over time by the delay between typing and seeing the cursor move. Both the network and emacs contributed to the feeling: There was the overall "weather" of the network: sometimes sunny and fast, sometimes sprinkled with light delays, and sometimes stormy congestion. Then there were occasional incidents that came and went, like network hiccoughs and emacs paging and grinding. And then there was the overall load of the system, which gave you the baseline delay (which gave it a very tactile day -vs- night feeling, since you got more of the machine to yourself during the night when it felt snappy, but it felt sluggish during the day). It really felt like either the network, emacs, or both would fall asleep if you didn't keep them warm and lavish them with attention. A VAX 11/780 running Gosling Emacs over a dialup had a very different feel than a PDP-10 running ITS Emacs over the arpanet. The busy VAX was bursty and had a lot of bumpy paging -- you had to keep your buffers warm or they would all get paged out and it would take a long time to wake back up, but there was no network delay from the direct dialup. While the PDP-10 ran smoothly like a well lubricated steam locomotive, sometimes slowing down when busy, but hovering around same speed instead of bursting, and the delay was mostly the feel of arpanet congestion and imps dozing off. (Or so I imagined. I had a lot of time to sit and think while waiting for the cursor to move again, and the mind wanders and wonders what's happening...) TOPS-20 had a wonderful ^T keyboard interrupt that you could type to instantly show the system load and time. (But of course you couldn't use that in emacs, which puts the tty into raw mode.) Somebody at the university implemented ^T to 4.2 BSD on the cs department's busy VAX 11/780, by modifying the tty driver. But initially, there was no limit to how often you could type it, and calculating the current system load wasn't a trivial operation. So on a fast terminal, if you held down and auto-repeated ^T, it would bring the entire system to its knees, and you could watch the load go up and up and up as you caused it to! Very satisfying indeed. Eventually they put in a one-per-second limit on ^T.
yason 7y ago
Making a huge selection with mouse in LibreOffice spreadsheets even today goes faster if you move the mouse while dragging one endpoint of the selection over the spreadsheet borders which causes the sheet to scroll. Likely the very same cause: there's a timer or other repeating tick to scroll content at a reasonable speed but the sheet is also scrolled when input events wake up the same loop.
- Vrondi 7y ago
  The same is true in MS Word and even in many web browsers.
- consp 7y ago
  I remember this with any selection in windows on at least 3.1/95/98/SE. This happened if you kept the mouse just inside the window and moved it about 10-20px up and down in/out pf the window in the direction of the selection. It was a way for me to scroll faster than with the wheel or cursors on web pages if you selected some text and then kept the selection on the end of the screen and moved the mouse wildly in the edge of the screen. As I was younger then, there was probably a better solution to do this but I was not aware of it.
Kurakuan 7y ago
Sometimes the software itself may even just be designed that way too. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Hidden-Tax-Moves https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Hidden-Tax-Moves
hsnewman 7y ago
Rather than being interrupt driven (CPU interrupts), it was event driven.
snarfy 7y ago
It's this bit of code: while(GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0) { TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } The mouse isr would cause a loop like this to execute at some point, processing all the messages on the queue. Win95 had preemption, but it ran at 100hz. Moving the mouse caused additional queue processing on top of the time sliced preemption.
- cantstop 7y ago
  At that time, it was more like the 75mhz range.
  - achandlerwhite 7y ago
    Note he said 100hz not mhz. Essentially 100 times per second the message queue would process but if you moved the mouse it would process faster.
    - the-dude 7y ago
      And the BSDs and Linux also have the HZ parameter for scheduling and for a long time the default has been as low as 100 Hz. Not sure what the current status quo is.
      - brandmeyer 7y ago
        Tickless
      - trasz 7y ago
        For FreeBSD it's been 1000 for... ages, except for virtual machines, where it seems to be 100 by default.
      - asveikau 7y ago
        Some guides for better battery life on FreeBSD recommend setting it to 100 Hz.
      - 7y ago
DonHopkins 7y ago
When I used to hang out at Radio Shack in the mall to play on a TRS-80's after school, they would draw a pair of asterisks in the corner of the screen and occasionally flash one of them on and off, as they loaded from cassette tape. One of the older kids who hung out there would tell us newer kids that we could speed up loading by repeatedly pressing the up arrow key on the keyboard. Of course us new kids didn't realize that the loading speed was completely determined by the cassette tape speed, which the keyboard couldn't possibly affect. But at least it gave us something to do while waiting, and the older kids something to laugh at.
- nemo44x 7y ago
  Reminds me back in the day using a file sharing/community program called Caraccho (for Mac) - similar to Hotline. Often people would queue up on someone's server (running of their desktop computer) to download a file since the server admin could set how many concurrent downloads from all users were allowed. Folks would send messages to people saying that if they hit Command-Q it makes the client run in "quick mode" which will speed up their download. Of course some folks would fall for this and you'd see their name drop off the server, moving everyone up 1 spot in the queue. Super effective for users that had not setup an avatar indicating they were new to the system and would fall for anything once.
  - birdman3131 7y ago
    Reminds me of the runescape cheat of alt+f4
    - glenneroo 7y ago
      I'm confident that the Alt+f4 cheat-code was around before Runescape ;) It was inevitably told to every new member at our LAN parties in the late 90s - the few who knew were often assigned admin duty to diagnose network/PC problems (which were frequent).
  - vageli 7y ago
    > Reminds me back in the day using a file sharing/community program called Caraccho (for Mac) - similar to Hotline. Often people would queue up on someone's server (running of their desktop computer) to download a file since the server admin could set how many concurrent downloads from all users were allowed. Folks would send messages to people saying that if they hit Command-Q it makes the client run in "quick mode" which will speed up their download. Of course some folks would fall for this and you'd see their name drop off the server, moving everyone up 1 spot in the queue. Super effective for users that had not setup an avatar indicating they were new to the system and would fall for anything once. This was also common on IRC to get script kiddies to kick themselves.
zellyn 7y ago
I definitely remember seeing scrolling-is-faster-if-you-wiggle-the-mouse on Linux too, back in the day, and being surprised that a bug (? misfeature?) like that would show up on such different stacks.
- blihp 7y ago
  Back in the day it wasn't a bug, but rather more of a cheat to make your system feel faster than it really was: if the system actually gave the UI a fair share of CPU cycles, the system would feel incredibly sluggish. Conversely, if it gave the UI the lions share of CPU, nothing would ever get done in the background. So it compromised and gave the UI preferential treatment when the user was active (i.e. when there was recent mouse/keyboard activity), and a more fair allocation when they weren't so other things could get done.
woliveirajr 7y ago
One thing that also worked was to open and close the CD-ROM tray. It felt like HDD was waiting for something that open-close action on the CD-ROM drive would trigger some reaction.
nottorp 7y ago
Had that in an app i was working on ages ago. We were doing some processing on a database and updating the progress bar every record. We processed the UI messages at that point as well so any click on Cancel could get through. As customer databases grew, the processing began to exhibit this behaviour. If I remember well, we fixed it by only updating the progress bar every 1%. It may have been more complicated than that though, I had moved on to another job when the fix was done.
raxxorrax 7y ago
So in today's world... why do so many PCs emit a slight sound when moving the mouse. I know that there are high frequencies involved and periphery is one of the worst perpetrators of electromagnetic interference, but I still find that strange. And what exactly is emitting the sound here?
- jacobush 7y ago
  I'd have to guess the CPU - it gets hammered with interrupts and its load changes. But it could be anything really...
  - shawnz 7y ago
    Don't USB mice use polling rather than interrupts?
- devttyeu 7y ago
  Most likely voltage regulotor coils (which live in PSU / GPU or motherboard)
- _trampeltier 7y ago
  When it whas really quiet, I could hear sound from my old cellphone when the screen updatet (Moto G4).
- blihp 7y ago
  Generally it's cheap/poorly designed audio amplifier circuits. Even though modern PC audio is mostly digital, the final stage (getting sound out the speaker) is still analog. If the motherboard designer isn't careful about how they place/isolate/ground the analog audio circuitry, it can pick up some of the PC's stray high frequency noise which gets worse the more you turn up the volume since now the noise gets amplified too. A work around if you have a motherboard that is particularly bad about this is to use the digital audio output (S/PDIF via an optical or RCA jack) to connect an external amplifier or you could stream it via software. This tends to only be an option if the machine is stationary and not terribly realistic for people with a laptop on the go.
stOneskull 7y ago
i used to have an obsessive habit of right-clicking the desktop and selecting refresh. took me ages to exorcise that out of me when i switched to a linux. i remember not liking that it didn't have that option.
estebarb 7y ago
I remember that with Windows 98SE, when it got stuck most of the times you can make it come back to life again by opening/closing the CD tray a lot of times...
goshx 7y ago
Wow, I always moved the cursor over the progress bar as I believed it made the installation go faster, but I never had actual proof. I guess I wasn't the only one.
joshlk 7y ago
I can't stop laughing!
tempguy9999 7y ago
I had something that may have been related. In VLC with my old monitor (1920x1080) watching a film it would often flicker painfully. I found moving the mouse continually would make it smooth. A bit of python... import ctypes, time def move(x, y): ctypes.windll.user32.SetCursorPos(x, y) for x in range(10000000): move(0, 0) time.sleep(0.01) move(1, 1) ... and all was well. (When I upgraded to a 4K monitor things got worse and the cursor fiddle doesn't help).
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  for x in range(10000000): Why not just use `while True:` ?
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    I... really don't know!
dec0dedab0de 7y ago
I used to open the CD drive when the entire computer would freeze up. I wonder if its the same thing.
- DigitalVerse 7y ago
  Same here! I can't remember if I did the moving mouse thing, but I definitely opened the CD drive to unfreeze the computer.
- nickpsecurity 7y ago
  I totally forgot about that! I did it, too. It's like it jarred it back into interactivity.
mikorym 7y ago
Now the only thing left is to figure out why Dungeon Keeper II crashed roughly 50% of the time at startup. Don't ask about my procurance of said software; we do not speak of such things. EDIT: And of course, a person who should not be named at the time remarked: "Computers always do the same thing, DKII can't be crashing sometimes and other times not..."
_o-O-o_ 7y ago
Also worth noting, I continue to use the 'Show Desktop' feature and have done so until Windows 10. (There's a hack in Win10 where you can enable the old 'Quick Launch' feature). I use this to quickly show how responsive the system is.
Japhy_Ryder 7y ago
This is why I love HN. I miss this mysterious, charming, golden era of tech.
- chadcmulligan 7y ago
  yes its good software doesn't behave strangely any more
kees99 7y ago
A somewhat similar effect is alive and well on Android: background processes run measurably faster while user holds/moves their finger across the screen, and couple of seconds thereafter. Mechanism is a bit different though: SufraceFlinger process that is responsible for acquiring touchscreen input, temporarily boosts CPU and GPU frequencies to make sure screen animations are nice and fluid.
- ben_w 7y ago
  A previous employer of mine explicitly requested this behaviour in their app. The app showed a map, and could align map north with compass north; to save battery, it would drop to an incredibly low frame rate (1fps?) about one second after your finger left the screen. It achieves the power goal, and has a high rating in the App Store, so I learned something about user requirements and being humble from this experience.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    Question (I don't know how Android works) -- how is there even a "frame rate" for a map that isn't moving? Shouldn't it not be doing anything at all when nobody is touching anything?
    - markdown 7y ago
      > could align map north with compass north Maybe the map turns as you turn so as to maintain compass north.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        Just to confirm: yes, that is exactly what I meant.
        mehrdadn 7y ago
        Oh I see, it was supposed to align in real time, I missed that. Thanks.
mcguire 7y ago
Entertaining, but probably unrelated: there was a systems paper from the late '90s or early 2000s (SOSP?) where the authors used an extremely low priority process recording timestamps to instrument system behavior. Basically, because the process wouldn't run if anything else was runnable, it wouldn't generate its periodic timestamps. As a result, they could easily see relatively low-level details about system CPU behavior. One thing they discovered was that Windows 95 would enter a tight CPU polling loop if you held the mouse button down. So, don't do that. [Edit: dammit, I cannot find the paper. Sorry. It was really interesting.]
Plasmoid2000ad 7y ago
I had an ailing Windows 95 Laptop that in its later years stopped functioning entirely unless I wiggled the mouse. This all makes a lot of sense now.
kazinator 7y ago
In 1986, some computer graphics researchers in California (namely Conrad Huang, Ken Arnold, and Greg Couch at U. of California, San Francisco, Computer Graphics Lab) wrote a multi-player TTY game called hunt. The game of hunt is clocked by the arrival of events. So that is to say, the arrival of packets from the game clients into the server drives the game forward. The more furiously people play and the more players there are, the more rapid is the movement of automatic objects, like shots traversing through the maze. I last played this in 1995. I had a WYSE 50 terminal hooked up to a Linux box and played with a friend. One of us was on the console, one on the terminal. I remember I had to patch something socket-related in the source code to get it working.
jaggednad 7y ago
Wow, I remember doing this as a kid and thinking to myself that I was being stupid because surely wiggling the mouse would make the computer have to process more input and actually slow down whatever I was impatiently waiting for. I still did it though, because I _felt_ like it made things go faster. Turns out that intuition was right. Funny how we can learn to do things that actually work even when our conscious mind doesn’t believe they do.
atannen 7y ago
I think I remember (1980s/90s) if you were copying a file to/from a remote host (with ftp or something), you could improve the throughput speed by pinging the remote. Maybe ethernet, or maybe ppp/slip, I'm not sure.
kbouck 7y ago
So should be possible to build a usb turbo button (or foot pedal) which just triggers mouse movement events?
satysin 7y ago
I remember writing documentation circa 2002 for a development environment that required Visual Studio 6.0 and as part of the install notes I wrote something along the lines of - "During installation constantly move the mouse in a circular motion over the installation window. This speeds up installation roughly 2-3x" Good times :)
- zahreeley 7y ago
  What is circa? Btw It means bad word in Indian slangs.
chris_wot 7y ago
There was a KB article where an old very of Microsoft Query (?) ran slowly. The second solution said to move the mouse around whilst the query ran. Funniest article I’ve ever seen in the Microsoft KB! But it worked.
- userbinator 7y ago
  This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228 Unfortunately KB articles seem to be decaying at an alarming rate; only the archive has luckily saved this one from vanishing forever: http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702 http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.mic...
badsavage 7y ago
Best game ad I have seen for a while
dbtx 7y ago
I have a terrifically annoying bug that shows up somewhere between X and GTK and all Gecko-based browsers. While I'm scrolling down in a web page with the mouse wheel, within a few seconds the page will stop moving. The mouse will still move around, but it will stop changing its cursor based on hovered elements, and further mouse actions will do nothing. It will unjam itself something like 30 seconds later if I wait, or immediately if I press any key. Then all the queued mouse events will rush through at once, so if the key I hit was Ctrl, the page's contents zoom out and I have to reset it. If I hit Shift, it walks back through the history and I lose my place. So I was hitting Alt for a while, besides shopping for a distro. I couldn't debug it normally, or even get a clue about which package needs to be downgraded, because I can't pop over to the terminal without unjamming it. So I'd need another machine with which to SSH in, and those are all unusable ATM (well, I probably just needed to suck it up and install SSH on the phone). But ${somehow} I found out that triggering a redraw with ${something} also unjams it, so I set the clock in the XFCE panel (also GTK, FWIW) to display seconds as well. Now it still jams but always for less than a second.
- dbtx 7y ago
  > ${somehow}, ${something} Sorry, something resurfaced-- I think I remember now that I switched on seconds for the sake of finding out more precisely how long a jam would last. Immediately it became obvious that they didn't last long anymore, and that the reason it used to be "30-ish seconds" was whenever the minutes finally changed, it broke loose just the same way.
  - dbtx 7y ago
    Hmm, it goes away if I use Fluxbox instead of XFCE. Neat.
qwerty456127 7y ago
Funny. I've seen people doing this back in the windows 95 days but believed that was just a superstition.
analog31 7y ago
We had a milling machine that ran from Win95, and we had to discipline ourselves not to move the mouse when it was milling a complex shape. Otherwise the machine would stutter and give us a nasty finish on the machined part.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
What olden times are the article and the comments speaking of? Scrolling is still faster when selecting while wiggling the mouse, at least on Windows 7 with Firefox, for me. Just tried it right now to make sure.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
In some applications with scrolling work areas, I'd end up trying to move it in pixel perfect straight lines when dragging stuff past the visible work area, so as to speed up the refresh and keep the mouse in the part of the border where you get maximum scrolling speed. I always assumed that Windows95 was just scared of mice, so if you shook one at it, it would either run faster in fear, leaving a trail of random disc sectors, or suddenly hide under its special blue blanket and refuse to come out again.
userbinator 7y ago
Sorry, but I'd just like to point out that top answer (about async I/O in Win95) is wrong and sounds like someone repeating something he (mis)heard once. I actually wrote apps in the Win95 days, and I can say that async (i.e. overlapped) I/O, which seems to be what he's talking about in the rest of the answer about IO completions, basically does not exist at all on the Win9x series; it was an NT-exclusive feature. There were some bits and pieces that seemed to work somewhat from what I remember, but to quote my trusty old WIN32.HLP regarding the ReadFile function: "Windows 95 For asynchronous read operations, hFile can be a communications resource, mailslot, or named pipe handle opened with the FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED flag by CreateFile, or a socket handle returned by the socket or accept functions. Windows 95 does not support asynchronous read operations on disk files." ...so his example about file copying and installers is invalidated. The correct answer(s) are of course lower down on the page and in the comments, where everyone talking about "pumping the message loop" gets it right. The second anecdote about scrolling behaviour also hits vaguely beside the point; it has nothing to do with multitasking, is only tangentially related to "pumping the message loop", and can be explained very simply: moving the mouse causes a WM_MOUSEMOVE message to be sent to the window, containing the new coordinates of the cursor. The edit control that Notepad is composed of handles this message when in selection mode by checking if the position is outside of the control, and scrolls appropriately by a single amount if so. If you continue moving the mouse outside the control with a selection highlighted, the generation of WM_MOUSEMOVE continues, and thus the scrolling too. Stop moving the mouse, and the scrolling stops. There is nothing else to it. Other controls/windows (e.g. browsers) may handle this select-scroll behaviour differently; some will start a timer that continues to issue scroll messages as long as you hold down the button, and some even fancier ones will vary the rate of the timer depending on how far from the control's edge the current position is (so you can adjust the auto-scrolling speed easily.) Only the third answer is when we start getting closer to an accurate explanation, the fourth answer about WM_TIMER is quite off-the-mark, and then the rest of them vary in accuracy between "close, but not quite" and "no, just no." (Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons I don't use SE/SO.)
RyanShook 7y ago
Would it actually run more quickly or just feel like it was running faster? I thought moving the mouse gave more frequent feedback but I didn’t think it reduced the time it took to install an application.
fredsanford 7y ago
This still happens in a way in current OS's... When marking text to copy and making it scroll, moving the mouse left and right will speed up the scrolling sometimes. Try it in a long Word doc or in Firefox.
mikorym 7y ago
And when you click in Excel while it is stuck computing, does it prioritise the cell you are clicking on, or could it be that it actually does compute more quickly then?
StillBored 7y ago
Given all the me too's. How about this one, same basic problem in the mid 2000's with linux. We were running a few servers with a normal desktop distro. I got the bright idea that since no one was actually on the console we could save some ram/CPU by changing the default runlevel and not starting X/etc. Took about 2 days before someone complained we were running about 20% slower than normal. I think in the end the solution was to just fire off a X/xdm pair as I wasted a few days looking at scheduling/numa/shared interrupts/etc trying to get a good solid solution that didn't require starting X. We ran it like that for a couple years until eventually someone tried it again (after a bunch of software/hardware upgrades) and the perf didn't fall off.
Yizahi 7y ago
While we are at it, can anyone tell me why selecting large text in a scrollable window works faster when you move the mouse?
wruza 7y ago
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 on your machine the speed up can be several times faster. I always thought that this scroll behavior is known and special in that it helps precise scrolling. I know winapi and why this happens, but never viewed it as a wild bug. Can’t recall now, but I think Mac and Linux behave the same way. Can someone confirm that?
malloy 7y ago
It helps to wake up the computer :-)
tepper43 7y ago
To understand if all the OS it is freeze
trungvmn 7y ago
Each generation of parents is responsible for raising their children to mature, to be good people of the family and useful for society. Ancestors taught grandparents and grandparents to teach their parents, and parents to teach us. So in general, good ancestors, good grandparents, good grandparents, good parents, and then good children. However, good parents whose children become corrupt, destroy society, even kill their own parents, who does this responsibility belong to? People will contemplate or listen to ideas, judgments, or conclusions from experts on education, humanity and society, up to law, ethics, and of course not forgetting to refer to monks of religions, to judge about spoiled children. https://privatecartransferhoian.com/tour/private-car-transfer-danang-hue-city/ https://privatecartransferhoian.com/tour/private-car-transfe...

1188 points by folli 7y ago

Further, when installing, it would hang at some point without any sign of a prompt but would instantly continue if the mouse were moved. You could easily test this - turn your mouse upside-down during install and wait (to avoid any incidental mouse motion due to desk vibration etc). Told my IT friend who was loading my machine and he said "you're confused; I've installed hundreds of times and never seen that". So I turned his mouse upside down and waited. Voila! It hung.

chadcmulligan 7y ago
I recall quite a few times having to send a message to the message queue in code I'd written for this reason. I forget why though - someone can probably remind me, if I didn't send a message it would just stop.

FillardMillmore 7y ago

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.

gibspaulding 7y ago
It looks like you're not the only one! From the comments on the top response: > "If true, I owe some baby boomers apologies for things I said about 20 years ago"
mrzool 7y ago
Call him and tell him!
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  That's sweet. It will make his day.
mat_jack1 7y ago
I'm in your situation, I'm so impressed!
air7 7y ago
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.
- butisaidsudo 7y ago
  I love these kind of issues, here are two classics: - Open Office won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161/comments/28 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161... - Can't send email more than 500 miles: http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    One thing about the famous "500 miles" post that I realized doesn't make sense: ---- An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays. Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell: $ units 1311 units, 63 prefixes You have: 3 millilightseconds You want: miles * 558.84719 / 0.0017893979 ---- But surely for Sendmail to register a "connect" with a remote SMTP server would require at least one (or many?) round trips to the remote server, so one-way speed of light time doesn't seem like it would really be relevant. Am I missing something?
    - NateEag 7y ago
      Possibly the introduction wherein the author says: "The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining." If memory serves he goes into further detail about the alterations and some common objections to the story in his FAQ: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html
matthoiland 7y ago
I just send my dad an apology as well.

RyJones 7y ago

This reminds me of using NUM LOCK to see if your CPU was responding to the A20 interrupt.

UI_at_80x24 7y ago
Are you telling me that's not the correct way to find out? All these years I've been wrong!
- RyJones 7y ago
  Not at all! If it works, do it!
Sharlin 7y ago
Isn’t the use of the lock buttons, like, the standard way to test whether the OS/hardware still responds to something or if it’s reboot time?
- RyJones 7y ago
  They’re soft now. It might indicate your usb driver is wedged, not if your CPU is responding to interrupts at all. This is a problem for NTP developers - finding real serial ports on modern hardware
  - toast0 7y ago
    The keyboard lights have always been soft. There are certainly more layers now between a keyboard and an os though.
    - myself248 7y ago
      The softness is precisely what made them a useful check, though. Tapping num lock has two important properties: Nothing should ever be blocking that process, and it's harmless to do and should never really affect what's happening.
7y ago

Tade0 7y ago

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.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
"large applications that could take an hour to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input."

kabwj 7y ago

Reminds me of https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32233

DCoder 7y ago
Raymond Chen's blog is always a great source of interesting information. But I remember the times when that blog didn't look like a webdesign internship project in progress. And there were interesting comments…
- omnibrain 7y ago
  So much history was lost when microsoft migrated the blogs and deleted the comments...
rwbaskette 7y ago
As a matter of fact, I think he actually answered the question: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=36423 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.“

geniium 7y ago

noice, did not know that! Maybe I should give Win95 a go, as macOS is going pretty down.

0815test 7y ago

In order to show the properly random and non-deterministic behavior (e.g. random BSODs) that Windows users have come to expect, MS Windows needs to continuously gather high-quality entropy from its surrounding environment. That's why it stops when you're not wiggling the mouse; it's just waiting for you to provide the additional entropy it needs.

Sharlin 7y ago
No, it’s actually a little-known feature that allows Win95 to temporarily upclock the CPU during peak loads, using the power generated by vigorous mouse movements.

sansnomme 7y ago

Can flushing buffers be considered a cache invalidation problem?

UI_at_80x24 7y ago

This 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 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.)

samstave 7y ago
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 - my dad was livid. He yelled at me and said “why are you wasting all this time with computers! Its never going to do anything for you!” Years later after i became successful with yee olde computerz! He apologized to me and said “im sorry i yelled at you for that time you cost me all that money in long distance charges.”
- chasingthewind 7y ago
  I also got yelled at by my dad for racking up long distance charges in 1991 or 92 but in my case it was only about $150 for calling the Sierra BBS to download stuff for King's Quest games or something :)
  - samstave 7y ago
    Wonderful! Were you also calling into PCLink? I used to have a challenge with my best friend at the time: We used to call 411 and challenge to whom could keep the 411 operator on the phone longest.

hwj 7y ago

From the answer on Stack Exchange: > The effect was quite pronounced; large applications that could take an hour to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input.

_trampeltier 7y ago

From 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 on your machine the speed up can be several times faster. It's not just Notepad :-) I do this often, when I have to mark a lot of things.

metalchianti 7y ago
Strange but mine doesn't scroll UNLESS I move the mouse. I wonder if this is because I have the "Adjust for best performance" option set?
shawnz 7y ago
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.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  Yeah there is no way this has anything to do with the same behavior. What's likely happening is there's a delay in auto-scroll, and by generating new mouse events your triggering manual scrolls at a higher rate (or in addition to?) than auto-scroll.
- codedokode 7y ago
  I think it is not acceleration, but rather a position of mouse relative to the edge of a window.
dTal 7y ago
I think you'll find that Shift + Page Down is the fastest way to mark a lot of text, since you're doing it page by page instead of character by character.

itissid 7y ago

Its like rage shake for mouse! If you are angry and shake your mouse in rage it moves things faster. I imagine this would be a very satisfying thing to be able to do.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Ah, 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 stuck when generating a random number call). But there must have been something, and I must have experienced it early enough in my childhood.

DonHopkins 7y ago
While running emacs over a modem to arpanet or dialup, I got into the habit of regularly typing ^A ^E to pace my cursor back and forth across the current line, to keep the connection and emacs warm. (Like a caged leopard or mad scientist pacing back and forth.) I could feel how responsive the connection and emacs were over time by the delay between typing and seeing the cursor move. Both the network and emacs contributed to the feeling: There was the overall "weather" of the network: sometimes sunny and fast, sometimes sprinkled with light delays, and sometimes stormy congestion. Then there were occasional incidents that came and went, like network hiccoughs and emacs paging and grinding. And then there was the overall load of the system, which gave you the baseline delay (which gave it a very tactile day -vs- night feeling, since you got more of the machine to yourself during the night when it felt snappy, but it felt sluggish during the day). It really felt like either the network, emacs, or both would fall asleep if you didn't keep them warm and lavish them with attention. A VAX 11/780 running Gosling Emacs over a dialup had a very different feel than a PDP-10 running ITS Emacs over the arpanet. The busy VAX was bursty and had a lot of bumpy paging -- you had to keep your buffers warm or they would all get paged out and it would take a long time to wake back up, but there was no network delay from the direct dialup. While the PDP-10 ran smoothly like a well lubricated steam locomotive, sometimes slowing down when busy, but hovering around same speed instead of bursting, and the delay was mostly the feel of arpanet congestion and imps dozing off. (Or so I imagined. I had a lot of time to sit and think while waiting for the cursor to move again, and the mind wanders and wonders what's happening...) TOPS-20 had a wonderful ^T keyboard interrupt that you could type to instantly show the system load and time. (But of course you couldn't use that in emacs, which puts the tty into raw mode.) Somebody at the university implemented ^T to 4.2 BSD on the cs department's busy VAX 11/780, by modifying the tty driver. But initially, there was no limit to how often you could type it, and calculating the current system load wasn't a trivial operation. So on a fast terminal, if you held down and auto-repeated ^T, it would bring the entire system to its knees, and you could watch the load go up and up and up as you caused it to! Very satisfying indeed. Eventually they put in a one-per-second limit on ^T.

yason 7y ago

Making a huge selection with mouse in LibreOffice spreadsheets even today goes faster if you move the mouse while dragging one endpoint of the selection over the spreadsheet borders which causes the sheet to scroll. Likely the very same cause: there's a timer or other repeating tick to scroll content at a reasonable speed but the sheet is also scrolled when input events wake up the same loop.

Vrondi 7y ago
The same is true in MS Word and even in many web browsers.
consp 7y ago
I remember this with any selection in windows on at least 3.1/95/98/SE. This happened if you kept the mouse just inside the window and moved it about 10-20px up and down in/out pf the window in the direction of the selection. It was a way for me to scroll faster than with the wheel or cursors on web pages if you selected some text and then kept the selection on the end of the screen and moved the mouse wildly in the edge of the screen. As I was younger then, there was probably a better solution to do this but I was not aware of it.

Kurakuan 7y ago

Sometimes the software itself may even just be designed that way too. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Hidden-Tax-Moves https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Hidden-Tax-Moves

hsnewman 7y ago

Rather than being interrupt driven (CPU interrupts), it was event driven.

snarfy 7y ago

It's this bit of code: while(GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0) > 0) { TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } The mouse isr would cause a loop like this to execute at some point, processing all the messages on the queue. Win95 had preemption, but it ran at 100hz. Moving the mouse caused additional queue processing on top of the time sliced preemption.

cantstop 7y ago
At that time, it was more like the 75mhz range.
- achandlerwhite 7y ago
  Note he said 100hz not mhz. Essentially 100 times per second the message queue would process but if you moved the mouse it would process faster.
  - the-dude 7y ago
    And the BSDs and Linux also have the HZ parameter for scheduling and for a long time the default has been as low as 100 Hz. Not sure what the current status quo is.
    - brandmeyer 7y ago
      Tickless
    - trasz 7y ago
      For FreeBSD it's been 1000 for... ages, except for virtual machines, where it seems to be 100 by default.
    - asveikau 7y ago
      Some guides for better battery life on FreeBSD recommend setting it to 100 Hz.
    - 7y ago

DonHopkins 7y ago

When I used to hang out at Radio Shack in the mall to play on a TRS-80's after school, they would draw a pair of asterisks in the corner of the screen and occasionally flash one of them on and off, as they loaded from cassette tape. One of the older kids who hung out there would tell us newer kids that we could speed up loading by repeatedly pressing the up arrow key on the keyboard. Of course us new kids didn't realize that the loading speed was completely determined by the cassette tape speed, which the keyboard couldn't possibly affect. But at least it gave us something to do while waiting, and the older kids something to laugh at.

nemo44x 7y ago
Reminds me back in the day using a file sharing/community program called Caraccho (for Mac) - similar to Hotline. Often people would queue up on someone's server (running of their desktop computer) to download a file since the server admin could set how many concurrent downloads from all users were allowed. Folks would send messages to people saying that if they hit Command-Q it makes the client run in "quick mode" which will speed up their download. Of course some folks would fall for this and you'd see their name drop off the server, moving everyone up 1 spot in the queue. Super effective for users that had not setup an avatar indicating they were new to the system and would fall for anything once.
- birdman3131 7y ago
  Reminds me of the runescape cheat of alt+f4
  - glenneroo 7y ago
    I'm confident that the Alt+f4 cheat-code was around before Runescape ;) It was inevitably told to every new member at our LAN parties in the late 90s - the few who knew were often assigned admin duty to diagnose network/PC problems (which were frequent).
- vageli 7y ago
  > Reminds me back in the day using a file sharing/community program called Caraccho (for Mac) - similar to Hotline. Often people would queue up on someone's server (running of their desktop computer) to download a file since the server admin could set how many concurrent downloads from all users were allowed. Folks would send messages to people saying that if they hit Command-Q it makes the client run in "quick mode" which will speed up their download. Of course some folks would fall for this and you'd see their name drop off the server, moving everyone up 1 spot in the queue. Super effective for users that had not setup an avatar indicating they were new to the system and would fall for anything once. This was also common on IRC to get script kiddies to kick themselves.

zellyn 7y ago

I definitely remember seeing scrolling-is-faster-if-you-wiggle-the-mouse on Linux too, back in the day, and being surprised that a bug (? misfeature?) like that would show up on such different stacks.

blihp 7y ago
Back in the day it wasn't a bug, but rather more of a cheat to make your system feel faster than it really was: if the system actually gave the UI a fair share of CPU cycles, the system would feel incredibly sluggish. Conversely, if it gave the UI the lions share of CPU, nothing would ever get done in the background. So it compromised and gave the UI preferential treatment when the user was active (i.e. when there was recent mouse/keyboard activity), and a more fair allocation when they weren't so other things could get done.

woliveirajr 7y ago

One thing that also worked was to open and close the CD-ROM tray. It felt like HDD was waiting for something that open-close action on the CD-ROM drive would trigger some reaction.

nottorp 7y ago

Had that in an app i was working on ages ago. We were doing some processing on a database and updating the progress bar every record. We processed the UI messages at that point as well so any click on Cancel could get through. As customer databases grew, the processing began to exhibit this behaviour. If I remember well, we fixed it by only updating the progress bar every 1%. It may have been more complicated than that though, I had moved on to another job when the fix was done.

raxxorrax 7y ago

So in today's world... why do so many PCs emit a slight sound when moving the mouse. I know that there are high frequencies involved and periphery is one of the worst perpetrators of electromagnetic interference, but I still find that strange. And what exactly is emitting the sound here?

jacobush 7y ago
I'd have to guess the CPU - it gets hammered with interrupts and its load changes. But it could be anything really...
- shawnz 7y ago
  Don't USB mice use polling rather than interrupts?
devttyeu 7y ago
Most likely voltage regulotor coils (which live in PSU / GPU or motherboard)
_trampeltier 7y ago
When it whas really quiet, I could hear sound from my old cellphone when the screen updatet (Moto G4).
blihp 7y ago
Generally it's cheap/poorly designed audio amplifier circuits. Even though modern PC audio is mostly digital, the final stage (getting sound out the speaker) is still analog. If the motherboard designer isn't careful about how they place/isolate/ground the analog audio circuitry, it can pick up some of the PC's stray high frequency noise which gets worse the more you turn up the volume since now the noise gets amplified too. A work around if you have a motherboard that is particularly bad about this is to use the digital audio output (S/PDIF via an optical or RCA jack) to connect an external amplifier or you could stream it via software. This tends to only be an option if the machine is stationary and not terribly realistic for people with a laptop on the go.

stOneskull 7y ago

i used to have an obsessive habit of right-clicking the desktop and selecting refresh. took me ages to exorcise that out of me when i switched to a linux. i remember not liking that it didn't have that option.

estebarb 7y ago

I remember that with Windows 98SE, when it got stuck most of the times you can make it come back to life again by opening/closing the CD tray a lot of times...

goshx 7y ago

Wow, I always moved the cursor over the progress bar as I believed it made the installation go faster, but I never had actual proof. I guess I wasn't the only one.

joshlk 7y ago

I can't stop laughing!

tempguy9999 7y ago

I had something that may have been related. In VLC with my old monitor (1920x1080) watching a film it would often flicker painfully. I found moving the mouse continually would make it smooth. A bit of python... import ctypes, time def move(x, y): ctypes.windll.user32.SetCursorPos(x, y) for x in range(10000000): move(0, 0) time.sleep(0.01) move(1, 1) ... and all was well. (When I upgraded to a 4K monitor things got worse and the cursor fiddle doesn't help).

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
for x in range(10000000): Why not just use `while True:` ?
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  I... really don't know!

dec0dedab0de 7y ago

I used to open the CD drive when the entire computer would freeze up. I wonder if its the same thing.

DigitalVerse 7y ago
Same here! I can't remember if I did the moving mouse thing, but I definitely opened the CD drive to unfreeze the computer.
nickpsecurity 7y ago
I totally forgot about that! I did it, too. It's like it jarred it back into interactivity.

mikorym 7y ago

Now the only thing left is to figure out why Dungeon Keeper II crashed roughly 50% of the time at startup. Don't ask about my procurance of said software; we do not speak of such things. EDIT: And of course, a person who should not be named at the time remarked: "Computers always do the same thing, DKII can't be crashing sometimes and other times not..."

_o-O-o_ 7y ago

Also worth noting, I continue to use the 'Show Desktop' feature and have done so until Windows 10. (There's a hack in Win10 where you can enable the old 'Quick Launch' feature). I use this to quickly show how responsive the system is.

Japhy_Ryder 7y ago

This is why I love HN. I miss this mysterious, charming, golden era of tech.

chadcmulligan 7y ago
yes its good software doesn't behave strangely any more

kees99 7y ago

A somewhat similar effect is alive and well on Android: background processes run measurably faster while user holds/moves their finger across the screen, and couple of seconds thereafter. Mechanism is a bit different though: SufraceFlinger process that is responsible for acquiring touchscreen input, temporarily boosts CPU and GPU frequencies to make sure screen animations are nice and fluid.

ben_w 7y ago
A previous employer of mine explicitly requested this behaviour in their app. The app showed a map, and could align map north with compass north; to save battery, it would drop to an incredibly low frame rate (1fps?) about one second after your finger left the screen. It achieves the power goal, and has a high rating in the App Store, so I learned something about user requirements and being humble from this experience.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Question (I don't know how Android works) -- how is there even a "frame rate" for a map that isn't moving? Shouldn't it not be doing anything at all when nobody is touching anything?
  - markdown 7y ago
    > could align map north with compass north Maybe the map turns as you turn so as to maintain compass north.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      Just to confirm: yes, that is exactly what I meant.
      - mehrdadn 7y ago
        Oh I see, it was supposed to align in real time, I missed that. Thanks.

mcguire 7y ago

Entertaining, but probably unrelated: there was a systems paper from the late '90s or early 2000s (SOSP?) where the authors used an extremely low priority process recording timestamps to instrument system behavior. Basically, because the process wouldn't run if anything else was runnable, it wouldn't generate its periodic timestamps. As a result, they could easily see relatively low-level details about system CPU behavior. One thing they discovered was that Windows 95 would enter a tight CPU polling loop if you held the mouse button down. So, don't do that. [Edit: dammit, I cannot find the paper. Sorry. It was really interesting.]

Plasmoid2000ad 7y ago

I had an ailing Windows 95 Laptop that in its later years stopped functioning entirely unless I wiggled the mouse. This all makes a lot of sense now.

kazinator 7y ago

In 1986, some computer graphics researchers in California (namely Conrad Huang, Ken Arnold, and Greg Couch at U. of California, San Francisco, Computer Graphics Lab) wrote a multi-player TTY game called hunt. The game of hunt is clocked by the arrival of events. So that is to say, the arrival of packets from the game clients into the server drives the game forward. The more furiously people play and the more players there are, the more rapid is the movement of automatic objects, like shots traversing through the maze. I last played this in 1995. I had a WYSE 50 terminal hooked up to a Linux box and played with a friend. One of us was on the console, one on the terminal. I remember I had to patch something socket-related in the source code to get it working.

jaggednad 7y ago

Wow, I remember doing this as a kid and thinking to myself that I was being stupid because surely wiggling the mouse would make the computer have to process more input and actually slow down whatever I was impatiently waiting for. I still did it though, because I _felt_ like it made things go faster. Turns out that intuition was right. Funny how we can learn to do things that actually work even when our conscious mind doesn’t believe they do.

atannen 7y ago

I think I remember (1980s/90s) if you were copying a file to/from a remote host (with ftp or something), you could improve the throughput speed by pinging the remote. Maybe ethernet, or maybe ppp/slip, I'm not sure.

kbouck 7y ago

So should be possible to build a usb turbo button (or foot pedal) which just triggers mouse movement events?

satysin 7y ago

I remember writing documentation circa 2002 for a development environment that required Visual Studio 6.0 and as part of the install notes I wrote something along the lines of - "During installation constantly move the mouse in a circular motion over the installation window. This speeds up installation roughly 2-3x" Good times :)

zahreeley 7y ago
What is circa? Btw It means bad word in Indian slangs.

chris_wot 7y ago

There was a KB article where an old very of Microsoft Query (?) ran slowly. The second solution said to move the mouse around whilst the query ran. Funniest article I’ve ever seen in the Microsoft KB! But it worked.

userbinator 7y ago
This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228 Unfortunately KB articles seem to be decaying at an alarming rate; only the archive has luckily saved this one from vanishing forever: http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.microsoft.com/kb/168702 http://web.archive.org/web/20140105042459/http://support.mic...

badsavage 7y ago

Best game ad I have seen for a while

dbtx 7y ago

I have a terrifically annoying bug that shows up somewhere between X and GTK and all Gecko-based browsers. While I'm scrolling down in a web page with the mouse wheel, within a few seconds the page will stop moving. The mouse will still move around, but it will stop changing its cursor based on hovered elements, and further mouse actions will do nothing. It will unjam itself something like 30 seconds later if I wait, or immediately if I press any key. Then all the queued mouse events will rush through at once, so if the key I hit was Ctrl, the page's contents zoom out and I have to reset it. If I hit Shift, it walks back through the history and I lose my place. So I was hitting Alt for a while, besides shopping for a distro. I couldn't debug it normally, or even get a clue about which package needs to be downgraded, because I can't pop over to the terminal without unjamming it. So I'd need another machine with which to SSH in, and those are all unusable ATM (well, I probably just needed to suck it up and install SSH on the phone). But ${somehow} I found out that triggering a redraw with ${something} also unjams it, so I set the clock in the XFCE panel (also GTK, FWIW) to display seconds as well. Now it still jams but always for less than a second.

dbtx 7y ago
> ${somehow}, ${something} Sorry, something resurfaced-- I think I remember now that I switched on seconds for the sake of finding out more precisely how long a jam would last. Immediately it became obvious that they didn't last long anymore, and that the reason it used to be "30-ish seconds" was whenever the minutes finally changed, it broke loose just the same way.
- dbtx 7y ago
  Hmm, it goes away if I use Fluxbox instead of XFCE. Neat.

qwerty456127 7y ago

Funny. I've seen people doing this back in the windows 95 days but believed that was just a superstition.

analog31 7y ago

We had a milling machine that ran from Win95, and we had to discipline ourselves not to move the mouse when it was milling a complex shape. Otherwise the machine would stutter and give us a nasty finish on the machined part.

PavlovsCat 7y ago

What olden times are the article and the comments speaking of? Scrolling is still faster when selecting while wiggling the mouse, at least on Windows 7 with Firefox, for me. Just tried it right now to make sure.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

In some applications with scrolling work areas, I'd end up trying to move it in pixel perfect straight lines when dragging stuff past the visible work area, so as to speed up the refresh and keep the mouse in the part of the border where you get maximum scrolling speed. I always assumed that Windows95 was just scared of mice, so if you shook one at it, it would either run faster in fear, leaving a trail of random disc sectors, or suddenly hide under its special blue blanket and refuse to come out again.

userbinator 7y ago

Sorry, but I'd just like to point out that top answer (about async I/O in Win95) is wrong and sounds like someone repeating something he (mis)heard once. I actually wrote apps in the Win95 days, and I can say that async (i.e. overlapped) I/O, which seems to be what he's talking about in the rest of the answer about IO completions, basically does not exist at all on the Win9x series; it was an NT-exclusive feature. There were some bits and pieces that seemed to work somewhat from what I remember, but to quote my trusty old WIN32.HLP regarding the ReadFile function: "Windows 95 For asynchronous read operations, hFile can be a communications resource, mailslot, or named pipe handle opened with the FILE_FLAG_OVERLAPPED flag by CreateFile, or a socket handle returned by the socket or accept functions. Windows 95 does not support asynchronous read operations on disk files." ...so his example about file copying and installers is invalidated. The correct answer(s) are of course lower down on the page and in the comments, where everyone talking about "pumping the message loop" gets it right. The second anecdote about scrolling behaviour also hits vaguely beside the point; it has nothing to do with multitasking, is only tangentially related to "pumping the message loop", and can be explained very simply: moving the mouse causes a WM_MOUSEMOVE message to be sent to the window, containing the new coordinates of the cursor. The edit control that Notepad is composed of handles this message when in selection mode by checking if the position is outside of the control, and scrolls appropriately by a single amount if so. If you continue moving the mouse outside the control with a selection highlighted, the generation of WM_MOUSEMOVE continues, and thus the scrolling too. Stop moving the mouse, and the scrolling stops. There is nothing else to it. Other controls/windows (e.g. browsers) may handle this select-scroll behaviour differently; some will start a timer that continues to issue scroll messages as long as you hold down the button, and some even fancier ones will vary the rate of the timer depending on how far from the control's edge the current position is (so you can adjust the auto-scrolling speed easily.) Only the third answer is when we start getting closer to an accurate explanation, the fourth answer about WM_TIMER is quite off-the-mark, and then the rest of them vary in accuracy between "close, but not quite" and "no, just no." (Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons I don't use SE/SO.)

RyanShook 7y ago

Would it actually run more quickly or just feel like it was running faster? I thought moving the mouse gave more frequent feedback but I didn’t think it reduced the time it took to install an application.

fredsanford 7y ago

This still happens in a way in current OS's... When marking text to copy and making it scroll, moving the mouse left and right will speed up the scrolling sometimes. Try it in a long Word doc or in Firefox.

mikorym 7y ago

And when you click in Excel while it is stuck computing, does it prioritise the cell you are clicking on, or could it be that it actually does compute more quickly then?

StillBored 7y ago

Given all the me too's. How about this one, same basic problem in the mid 2000's with linux. We were running a few servers with a normal desktop distro. I got the bright idea that since no one was actually on the console we could save some ram/CPU by changing the default runlevel and not starting X/etc. Took about 2 days before someone complained we were running about 20% slower than normal. I think in the end the solution was to just fire off a X/xdm pair as I wasted a few days looking at scheduling/numa/shared interrupts/etc trying to get a good solid solution that didn't require starting X. We ran it like that for a couple years until eventually someone tried it again (after a bunch of software/hardware upgrades) and the perf didn't fall off.

Yizahi 7y ago

While we are at it, can anyone tell me why selecting large text in a scrollable window works faster when you move the mouse?

wruza 7y ago

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 on your machine the speed up can be several times faster. I always thought that this scroll behavior is known and special in that it helps precise scrolling. I know winapi and why this happens, but never viewed it as a wild bug. Can’t recall now, but I think Mac and Linux behave the same way. Can someone confirm that?

malloy 7y ago

It helps to wake up the computer :-)

tepper43 7y ago

To understand if all the OS it is freeze

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