On my old 486 or first Pentium, when the computer would slow down and start trashing/swapping, the screensaver would enable itself while I waited... further cr

On my old 486 or first Pentium, when the computer would slow down and start trashing/swapping, the screensaver would enable itself while I waited... further crashing the computer. So moving the mouse did indeed make the computer faster ;) Later I became lazy and just pressed the ctrl or shift key. I still do it when watching movies with mplayer or in something browser-based (that does not disable the screenlock automatically).