Hey there,

So I have been experiencing some issues with mouse lag in games. Simply put the mouse, as it moves from left to right, appears to lag my game and at some point I can even freeze the frame of my game with the mouse movement. However, when I don't move the mouse at all I get my standard high frame rate

My mouse is a wired Microsoft Sidewinder and I have tried using the mouse with and without its driver still with the problem. Originally the problem was just with Steam powered games such as Team Fortress 2 or Garry's Mod however now the problem has extended to other games not even connected to Steam in any way.

I have Service Pack 3 installed and am running on XP Home Edition (32bit) and my GPU is a NVidia 280. [DxDiag Attaced]

Did you google "mouse causing 100% cpu usage xp"

There's stacks of stuff there for you to get sorted.

Ok I didn't find anything that pertains to my problem from the search but I have found out that when I move my mouse my CPU Usage hits about 45-55%. The process the usage is coming from is always what I have as active currently(i.e. using Internet Explorer the CPU usage is under the .exe process)

Not sure what this means exactly though...

Everyone's PC does this when there is sustained mouse movemenbt. Mine included. There's a lot of calculation going on when the mouse moves. The faster you move it the higher the CPU usage goes, to around 50%.

With Core 2 Due CPUs I don't worry about that because it's a multi-threasded activity.

Ok, started up on Safe Mode and the problem did not occur(a maximum of 10% CPU usage with mouse movement) so I am assuming that there is a process running that is causing this problem. The only problem is that my Anti-Virus Software has picked nothing up.

Any suggestions?

OK - so the CPU usage of the mouse itself is not the issue. As per your original post, it's mouse lag. What would I do? Sure, I'd want to know what's chewing up resources. A number of things come to mind, plus a question for you.

Is the Nvidia 280 a recent addition to your system?

When we've had mouse lag on Steam based games (my son that is), we had to reduce the screen resolution to get the right compromise with frame rate and mouse lag. So an experiment here might be necessary; if you've already done that, a report of what you noticed on the mouse performance would be useful.

I'd want to have Task Manager up in the corner of the screen or in another screen (your 280 supports a second monitor/tv). I'd want to note what was hogging or sharing the cpu both during mouse movement and when mouse is at rest.

I would make sure that everything that I didn't need to have loaded in RAM was unloaded. Your GTX 280 top slices 1GB off your 4GB of RAM; 2GB is reserved by XP for its Kernel to use (but it lowers the barrier if it doesn't need all of the 2GB), leaving about 1GB for your application (like Steam based game).

You can tip your DXDiag info into a spreadsheet and add up all the driver RAM in use or you can tot up the RAM used as logged in the Task Manager Processes Window along with all the other details about paged usage that Task manager displays WHEN YOUR GAME IS RUNNING & the mouse is playing up.

Ahead of diagnosis, I would gues that the solution would be to upgrade your RAM to 8GB, put VISTA 64 on and thereby remove what I suspect to be pagefile overheads slowing down your games.