Mouse Stutter

Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Any help, greatley appreciated, and thanks ...

Stephen G. Giannoni wrote:
Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Any help, greatley appreciated, and thanks ...

Mouse model number ?

Wired or wireless ?

Battery type/model used with it ?

PS/2 or USB ?

You're leaving a lot to the imagination.

Bad weather today, night not make it, */?'x no carrier

Thanks for responding.

The only model number seems to be very unclear on the underside,
something like "Microsoft Wireless Middle Mouse 350"

Battery is a single AA.

Mouse transmit wirelessly into the computer box.


On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 15:14:25 -0400, Paul wrote:

Stephen G. Giannoni wrote:
Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Any help, greatley appreciated, and thanks ...

Mouse model number ?

Wired or wireless ?

Battery type/model used with it ?

PS/2 or USB ?

You're leaving a lot to the imagination.

Bad weather today, night not make it, */?'x no carrier

On 6/5/2015 2:41 PM, Stephen G. Giannoni wrote:
Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Any help, greatley appreciated, and thanks ...


I recently had that happen with a wireless trackball. My problem turned out
to be a newly-replaced wireless dual-band router. The old single-band
router was no problem. I solved it by using a USB extension cord to move
the little receiver dongle closer to the desktop and away from the router.
No problems since that. Of course something like a mouse stutter could be
any number of things, especially unseen tasks eating clock cycles.

John McGaw wrote:
On 6/5/2015 2:41 PM, Stephen G. Giannoni wrote:
Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Any help, greatley appreciated, and thanks ...


I recently had that happen with a wireless trackball. My problem turned
out to be a newly-replaced wireless dual-band router. The old
single-band router was no problem. I solved it by using a USB extension
cord to move the little receiver dongle closer to the desktop and away
from the router. No problems since that. Of course something like a
mouse stutter could be any number of things, especially unseen tasks
eating clock cycles.

This is also a problem with USB3 ports connected to USB3
cables connected to poorly shielded peripherals. Moving
the "USB3 antenna" away from wireless mouse/dongle combo
helps. Intel has a report on its web site, about
broadband RF from the USB3 cable, smothering 2.4GHz.
I can't wait for USB 3.1 to come out, and interfere with
even more stuff.

This is not a problem with USB2 devices or cabling,
as spectrally the RF (if any) is not in the important
band. Many wireless HID devices now, run at 2.4GHz. Wifi
runs at 2.4GHz. Bluetooth runs at 2.4GHz (frequency hopping).

Whereas in the old days, a few HID devices were down in the
CB/toy car band (27MHz or so).

The USB3 RF is broadband and not narrow band,
so it covers quite a range of frequencies. The last USB3 product
I bought, had minimal shielding (treated with the same level of
concern as a USB2 design would be). But fortunately for
me, I have nothing Wifi/Bluetooth/nano_dongle related. All
mice here are wired (some PS/2, some USB, and even one
serial RS232 mouse running on the test PC right now).
Linux doesn't seem to recognize the serial mouse, when
I tried it. At least, not automatically like the Windows
I tested against.

The most likely failure on a LED/laser wired mouse, is
the cable eventually breaks where it enters the mouse.
My current mouse is "ripe", and I'm just waiting for
it to snap. That too will stutter and act up, once the
wire breaks.

Paul

Stephen G. Giannoni wrote:

Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Clean it. A tiny little hair or lint piece can flutter across the LED
which then the LED interprets as movement of the mouse. Get a
flashlight and peer into the LED opening and use a tweezers to remove
the crud. Alternatively, open the mouse to clean it thoroughly.

Another problem with ancient mice is the stranded wires in the cord will
break due to stress. Think about it: you can keep bending a metal plate
back and forth and over and over and eventually it breaks. Wires will
do the same. The only cure is to open the mouse, cut back on the cord
and solder the new exposed wire ends to wherever the old ones went on
the PCB inside the mouse. You probably should cut back about 2 inches
on the cord to make sure you are away from the flex point in the cord.
You can test if the wires are flaky simple by pressing on the mouse to
make sure it does not move at all and then flex the cord near the mouse
in all directions.

Most mice have buttons that are merely a split top half of the shell.
The plastic bends when you press to push down on a micro switch. If the
mouse is abused (banging on it) or merely from fatigue after years and
years of use, it may not flex back up far enough to allow the switch to
fully release (the clicking you hear is the switch snapping from closed
or to open). That means the slightest pressure on the button results in
no close of the switch because it wasn't allowed to snap to the open
position (i.e., it's still partially in its closed position). You can
try to flex the "button" areas of the top shell back up or even use a
hair dryer to release its fatigued position memory to remember a new
higher position when the heat is removed but that can be tricky.

Also, the switches are mechanical and will eventually break. If the
snap mechanism is weak, the switch could "bounce" several times when
closed (you press the button) and the same when opened (you release the
button). These bounces can several dozen within a few milliseconds so
you don't know there was a bounce but the hardware is fast enough to see
several of those bounces which means the OS see more than one close or
more than one open. You could open the shell and press on the small
tang sticking out the top of the micro switch to feel if it snaps when
closed and snaps when opened. The only cure for a broken or limp switch
is to unsolder it and solder in a new one. By that point, it's cheaper
and easier to just buy a new mouse unless you have some $100+ gaming
mouse you really want to keep using.

If you are using a mousepad, try a different style. Some mice just
don't like some pads. If the pad is a light color then use a dark
colored one. If you are using one of those high-tech micro precision
pads, some mice don't like those as they see less ridges in the material
within their resolution that can confuse the mouse. The mouse has to
average the changes it detects, the ridges or changes are at fixed
spacing, and the mouse will see 1 and use that while it might not quite
catch a change and average it with the next one. You could try changing
the sensitivity of the mouse to compensate. If the mouse software lets
you change acceleration based on rate of change, so enable that and
retest. If you are moving the mouse on glass or shiny surfaces (e.g.,
lacquered, enameled, or urethaned) then the depth of the material will
cause confusion regarding detection of change along with the problem of
reflection generating more changes than just how far the mouse traveled.
If the mouse worked okay before and you did not change the mouse pad or
the surface on which the mouse is moving then this isn't the problem.

You never identified you model of mouse. I find the laser mice to be
far too sensitive as they can detect the surface from farther away.
Hover the mouse over the pad, and move the mouse in circles while
gradually moving the mouse farther from the pad. You'll find regular
optical mice stop reacting after little movement away from the pad while
laser mice will continue to react much farther away. This means when
using a laser mouse that the pointer can change as you draw the laser
mouse away from the pad and when you then move the laser mouse toward
the pad. The pointer shifts as you lift and move the mouse, something
that you will often do with a mouse. No pad or desk of any size will
eliminate having to lift the mouse, especially if you enable Snap To to
automatically move the mouse to the focused object that appears on the
screen (e.g., a dialog shows up with OK the default button so Snap To
moves the mouse pointer to that button). I don't get laser mice because
of them moving the pointer even just a couple pixels which can screw up
drawing with the mouse. There may be a proximity setting that makes
lifting and dropping the laser mouse less "sharp" on seeing the surface
moving away or toward the mouse.

You could borrow a friend's mouse to see if the stutter goes away. Or
buy a new one for $12 w/shipping.

If it is a USB mouse, put it on a different controller than you have
other USB device(s). USB ports come in pairs because the controller has
2 ports. So move the USB mouse to a USB port whose paired USB port is
unused. That eliminate heavy traffic for another USB device from
interferring with the polling of the USB mouse.

Stephen G. Giannoni wrote:

The only model number seems to be very unclear on the underside,
something like "Microsoft Wireless Middle Mouse 350"

Battery is a single AA.

Mouse transmit wirelessly into the computer box.

Have you yet tried replacing the batteries in the wireless mouse?

Is there an unfettered line of sight between wireless mouse and USB
receiver? Did you put anything metallic between them?

If you replaced the batteries, and if there is a reset button on the
bottom of the mouse, did you press it to reestablish synchronization
between receiver and mouse?

On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 14:41:06 -0400, Stephen G. Giannoni wrote:

Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Maybe there's a program peaking the CPU? Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to see if
any programs are eating CPU power.

--
s|b

s|b wrote:
On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 14:41:06 -0400, Stephen G. Giannoni wrote:

Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Maybe there's a program peaking the CPU? Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to see if
any programs are eating CPU power.


You can check the responsiveness of a system with the
DPC latency checker. It gives you some idea how long
a hardware event would have to wait to get service.

http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml

It's simplistic to say a "busy computer causes stuttering".
The OS has mechanisms to bump up the DPC processing
rate, at the expense of your looping program getting
all the CPU cycles. The OS is actually defensively
designed for this stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Procedure_Call

The only thing it can't do anything about, is system
management interrupts (SMI), which completely
preempt the running OS, and put the BIOS in control
for short periods. Your computer could be running
SMI calls 30 times a second. If the motherboard
company wrote some bad BIOS code, this is enough to
prevent the usage of a motherboard for serious
audio workstation usage. And the DPC Latency checker
above, is all part of figuring that out (whether SMIs
are present, whether the system is responsive). The
presence of bad BIOS behavior, causes large spikes
all the time in DPCLAT.

*******

In this picture, I give a few examples of how
Windows remains responsive. These are collected under
WinXP.

http://i57.tinypic.com/nl3d5j.gif

1) Just started a 3D game. This activity represents the time
the Windows OS is least responsive. Apparently flipping the
video card to 3D mode for the first time, is really really
disruptive. It takes one frame time at 60Hz refresh (16 milliseconds),
to service an interrupt and its associated queued DPC.

2) Once in-game and firing rockets, hardware service time is
1 millisecond. If sitting in the desktop again, it's around 0.1
millisecond (green bars).

3a,3b) In this case, I've just started 7ZIP doing an ultra
compression, then moved back to my game. The service
time for the DPC is still 1 millisecond. If I flip
back to the desktop, service time is still in the
0.1 to 0.2 millisecond region.

So nothing stutters there, even though I'm gaming and compressing
a file at the same time.

There are ways to make hardware stutter. One way, is for
the kernel to have blocking calls in a hardware path. Which
happened on older OSes (Win98 network stack, a complete disaster).
A second way, is for hardware to mis-behave, and the OS does one
hardware reset after another on the thing, in rapid order. That
would be bound to cause disruption.

And if Windows is presented with an interrupt storm, by faulty
hardware (maybe 15,000 interrupts per second), it has a mitigation
technique that continues to make Windows responsive. It's unclear
whether this feature has been scaled properly, on later OSes
and hardware. So even if you leave a hardware interrupt
asserted permanently, Windows can live with that. It just
masks them for short periods of time or something.

Paul

Thanks all for the great info ...

On Fri, 05 Jun 2015 14:41:06 -0400, Stephen G. Giannoni
wrote:

Microsoft mouse, in 4 year old pentium system running Windows 7 home
premium, has developed an intermittent stutter.

Any help, greatley appreciated, and thanks ...