Today’s trick will give you an astounding performance boost, while at the same time make you just shake your fist at Microsoft.
First of all, to start with, let me say that my Dell Precision 470 (2.8Ghz Dual CPU with hyperthreading on) and 2GB of RAM running XP Pro is …slow. I mean the kind of slow where clicking the Start button takes several seconds to draw the rectangle for the menu.
I have a dual monitor system. I’m using a Dell 2005FPW via DVI at 1680×1050 60Hz as my primary monitor and a Dell 1907FP via analog SVGA/XGA at 1280×1024 60Hz as my secondary. Both are driven by an ATI FireGL V3100 using the latest drivers from ATI’s site for XP Professional, and hardware acceleration is set to full.
I first noticed the severity of the problem when using iTunes 7.3.1.3’s music visualizer. Here’s how playing a simple CD turned into a fantastic diagnostic tool.
With the iTunes visualizer running on the primary monitor, I noticed that when I put the mouse on the secondary monitor the visualizer ran at full speed and was completely fluid. When I put the mouse on the primary screen, even when I wasn’t moving it, the frame rate dropped to about two frames every second (music, however, played fine).
Task Manager, after a violent killing spree, showed a minimal number of processes and services, idle times in the high 90%s, and no interesting page or interrupt activity — but the behavior continued. Opening additional applications didn’t affect performance, as long as the mouse was on the secondary screen.
When I showed this behavior to a friend of mine, Brian Busch, he suggested I turn off mouse trails. And, to humor him, I did. Instantly my system sprung to life and the problem was gone.
That’s when it struck us. Windows XP’s mouse pointer options don’t use hardware acceleration. And to confirm it, I pressed the CTRL button, which showed the location of my mouse. As the little target was drawn around the cursor, the frame rate dropped. When Microsoft’s little visibility animation ended, the system resumed at full speed.
Why was mouse trails on? Because Dell still hasn’t fixed the jumping mouse problem. But I don’t love them enough to kill my system’s responsiveness. Laptop users, beware.
Performance Recommendation: Go to Settings / Control Panel / Mouse, select the Point Options tab, and in the Visibility section uncheck ‘Display Pointer Trails’, ‘Hide pointer while typing, as well as ‘Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key’ and press OK.
I’ve seen something similar. I’m using three monitors with Windows Vista, and it turns out that Vista uses hardware acceleration only for the monitors on the primary video adapter, and all the other video adapters get a software rendered mouse. My mouse trails would cause awful performance but only when on the third monitor. Turning off trails fixed the problem.
And that sucks cos I love me some mouse trails.
I had a similar issue except for me the performance of full screen flash videos was very poor – Turning off mouse trails improved it dramatically. Who would have thought that kind of thing would have such a massive impact!