What's more system intensive? Mouse on USB or PS2

[hatimh]

Anybody know?

I've noticed sometimes when there's heavy hard disk activity and a mouse is plugged into the USB port it start to get unresponsive.

This doesn't happen so much on PS2 but PS2 isn't as smooth. However I know you can increase the sample rate of the PS2 port but then does that place a heavier load on the system?

Thanks.

Beer is the devil's piss.

 

[jlanka]

My guess is PS2 is more intensive because the USB bus is faster. The question is where do these 2 input buses hook into the system?

 

[dmcmahon]

Make sure you have DMA turned on for the disk. My mouse was extremely sluggish during heavy disk operations until I figured this out. Now it's smooth under both USB and PS/2 (I have two mice hooked up to my system).

My guess is USB is more work; the number of events coming into the processor should be the same, but there's more layers of software drivers and request routing to go through for USB.

 

[hatimh]

es I agree with your answer there, because I felt also that USB has MoBo drivers, then OS drivers and then the actual driver for the mouse itself gets installed too, I knida see where you're getting at, but come to think of it maybe the speed of the USB bus compensates for that.


Beer is the devil's piss.

 

[Guest]

Something similar happened to me. It's because I have an ATA100 harddrive and Windows 2000 which automatically thinks the harddrive is ATA66. It'll get all laggy when the harddrive is active. I got that changed and now its working great.

 

[Crashman]

USB is less reliable than PS/2, BUT since you probably NEED your USB controller for other things, you could save an IRQ by disabling the PS/2 mouseport and using it for other things.

Cast not thine pearls before the swine