What kind of mouse are you using? A PS/2 style mouse, or a serial 'com port' mouse.

I am using a PS/2 mouse and the motherboard is using an Intel Triton 430FX chipset.

Have you tried running the "add new hardware" wizard inside Control Panel? Just to see what happens. It won't mess anything up, as you can just cancel the wizard. Also, you could try deleting your mouse resource (inside the System resources section), then running "add new hardware", to see if it adds the mouse back in, but perhaps with a different resource configuration.

I can't help but think however, that this is a type of resource conflict with your graphics card - I think it should have an IRQ assigned to it - but you mention that you can't see a way to assign it an IRQ.

Perhaps the Packard Bell mobo can't cope all that well with some non-onboard video adapters, due to some odd resource conflicts?

The PS/2 mouse is using IRQ 12... i ran the "add new hardware wizard" but it did not find anything. I am sure that some of the older PCI video cards did not need or use any IRQ's?
I think it was around the time Windows 98 was released motherboard manufacturers started adding the "Assign IRQ to VGA" option in the bios.

Maybe the stuttery mouse is due to an S3 driver problem? It's fine with the onboard Cirrus Logic 5440/30 (although it is a crap poor performing chip!) There are a couple of jumpers on the S3 board but i have no idea what they are for? (no pins on them) I cannot find any info on my S3 Virge! It's made by Colormax and is a 4mb S3 Virge DX (86C375)... thats it 😒

can you look at the manual of your motherboard and see if there is some kind of irq sharing explained?
For example my old PC board had some pci-slots sharing irqs with other on-board hardware and I had conflicts with usb devices and some pci cards, also in between the pci cards (e.g. SCSI card and soundcard).
Even if you don't have any documentation on this, reseating the S3 card to another slot might help.

Hmmm...a couple of jumpers on the S3 card eh...well, if I were you (and this isn't a recommendation for you to try this, it's just literally if I were in your shoes) I would slap on a jumper at a time, and just see what happens - to see if this makes the S3 card ask the mobo to assign it an IRQ. If it does, it might clear up this odd mouse 'conflict' problem.

I doubt if doing the above idea will mess anything up too badly. Can you take a close up pic of the S3 card, and post it on Vogons?

What driver are you using for the Virge?

Maybe check for motherboard drivers and/or BIOS updates and make sure you're using the newest video driver for that S3 card. Also try disabling the on-board video in the BIOS if you haven't explicitly disabled it.

You could also try moving the S3 video card to a different slot.

There are also utilities that tweak the PS/2 polling rate that may help.

I have tried the S3 Virge in a different slot and it is the same! I am using the S3 Virge DX drivers from the S3 website (dated 1997). There is no way the onboard Cirrus video can be completely disabled! There are no bios options and no jumpers for the onboard video. (it is curently disabled in Win95).

Also the manual does not state anything about IRQ sharing... this board is from around 1995/96 and does not have USB. The motherboard is a "Thousand Oaks PB640" and it uses a riser board with 2 PCI and 3 ISA slots (none of them are shared as far as i know)

I will see what the jumpers do on the card..... if it breaks then it's no problem as there are plenty of cheap PCI video cards available 😁

The two jumpers did not have caps on them.... so i tried them with a cap both on and off with each one and i did not notice anything different 😒 Oh well i guess i will just have to put up with a slightly "jittery" mouse cursor! I also tried a serial mouse and it was the same....

I have also noticed the mouse cursor is pretty much normal if i set the screen res to 640x480 and the colour pallette to 16 or 256 colours! anything higher and the mouse cursor loses it's "smoothness"???

EDIT: i have just noticed one of the jumpers limits the video memory to 2mb instead of 4mb! This card has 2mb soldered to the board with an extra 2mb in the sockets (all EDO DRAM as far as i can tell). Still not sure what the other jumper is for?

Can you give us any other info about the video card? Vendor, model number, anything?

HunterZ wrote:

Can you give us any other info about the video card? Vendor, model number, anything?

Ok this is what i can find by looking at the card...

Manufacturer: Colormax (this is what the sticker reads on the video bios chip)
Video Chip: S3 Virge/DX 86C375
FCC ID: BNX8400-00-00

There is also another number printed on the PCB which i assume is the model number?: 8239-24

I have tried looking for info on this card but cannot find much at all 🙁 I have found that some S3 Virge cards have a jumper to enable/disable IRQ2... this could be what the other jumper is for on my board but i cannot get it to do anything! (may need to mess around with mobo pnp ICU/Setup bios settings?).

> this could be what the other jumper is for on my board
I think so too. You can look if the trace from the jumper goes to an interrupt pin on the PCI bus, in that case it definitely enables the interrupt.

The S3 drivers don't seem to use the interrupt and the cards were delivered with the jumper off, so I doubt it's the cause of the problem (Maybe something takes 100% CPU?).

Maybe it's just down to the drivers? I am using Windows 95 OSR2 (win 95b) and the driver is dated 1997 (probably first release?) I will see if i can find some newer drivers somewhere.

I hope the onboard Cirrus Logic chip is not causing any problems? It is completely disabled within Windows and is not using any resources. There is no way at all to completely disable the onboard video chip from the bios and there are no jumpers on the mobo (supposed to be automatic 😖 )

As i said before this "jerky mouse" issue only happens when the display is set to anything higher than 640x480/256 colours. The board also uses Alliance 50ns EDO DRAM chips in the expansion sockets... if it helps at all?

These links may help:
http://www.s3graphics.com/en/drivers/legacy_s … .aspx#id_375drv
http://ranger.s3graphics.com/swlib/375drv/

May also be worth trying to find an updated driver for the on-board video and leaving it enabled (unless it disables itself) in case it's wanting to do some kind of weird passthrough thing.

Thanks for the links 😀 I am actually using those drivers at the moment... on the S3 site it shows 1998 and 1999 as driver dates but after installing and checking device manager it shows the driver date as 1997?

The onboard Cirrus chip gets disabled in Windows as soon as the S3 drivers are installed.... The Cirrus chip in device manager at the moment has got a red cross through it and when i installed directx for Win95 it actually updated the Cirrus drivers although it is disabled?

It also seems some S3 cards have jumpers that enable/disable the bios chip and also enable/disable DDC. I will check again later and make sure pnp options are disabled in my mobo bios 😀

My mobo pnp bios uses "ICU" - "boot to Windows95/Other/None" (currently set as ICU - boot to Windows 95)

or i can choose "System Setup" instead of the "ICU" option and it lists all the free IRQ's as available (this is non-pnp mode)

Non-pnp modes may be worth messing with if you suspect an IRQ conflict.

Maybe it's a problem with the hardware mouse cursor. Try setting the graphics hardware acceleration slider back one notch in the advanced display settings.