Rest of your system specs please?

You sure you don't have mouse trails enabled in Windows 98?

What monitor are you using? What resolution / color depth/ refresh rate?

What does task manager say your CPU and RAM usage are in XP?

Basically, XP sucks with only 512MB RAM. I won't do an XP machine with less than 1GB.

Back in the day, when I did a lot of onsite service calls, people would complain that their XP machines were slow. A lot of those only had 512MB RAM and all of it was being used up. Yet they almost always refused to spend $30 or so to add RAM which would have taken care of the problem.

So glad I don't do that anymore.

That CPU is also kinda slow for XP.

>>Rest of your system specs please?
512 MB Hynix SDRAM (single stick)
FSB speed -- 150 MHz
Diamond MX300

>>You sure you don't have mouse trails enabled in Windows 98?
It's not really trails -- it's "ghosting" of any monitor. Try moving your mouse in circles (~4-5 circles per second) -- you'll see what I mean.
I look at the distance between these "arrows" to check if the framerate is uniform. If it's uniform, and no frames are skipped, the distance between arrows will be same.

I also tried using "marquee" screensaver -- in Win98 the text moves with constant speed, but in Winxp it "moves rapidly, then stops for a moment, then again abruptly starts moving and so on":
See how smoothly it moves in Win98, and how "jerky" in WinXP:

>>What monitor are you using? What resolution / color depth/ refresh rate?
DVI-D DL Samsung P2250. Currently using 1920x1080x32, but it happens in any resolution, any bit depth, and even without video drivers.

>What does task manager say your CPU and RAM usage are in XP?
0%/20% (idle), typical for XP I guess

>Basically, XP sucks with only 512MB RAM. I won't do an XP machine with less than 1GB.
I'll try with one more RAM stick.

Are you 100% sure that's not monitor skipping frames?

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-03-04, 10:04:

Are you 100% sure that's not monitor skipping frames?

I used this monitor with my "modern" PC, and it worked flawlessly even in 75 Hz mode ("overclocked"), both D-Sub and DVI.
In Win98, same video mode is used as in XP, without issues. SO I guess it's not the case.

I can connect the other monitor too, and try using different video cable (I also have D-Sub).

Unfortnuately no change when using D-Sub and/or 1.5 GB RAM.

I had Celeron 1200 socket 370, integrated GPU (in the intel chipset), 512MB on a tiny HP PC running XP on a seagate U10. Pointer moved nicely.

You might need to watch the hard drive light when you move pointer, unplug ethernet too to rule out. malware scanner off. If you have too many things installed in your add/remove programs, this also can do this. I optimized the R40 long ago that had so much bloat, using add/remove program in the system control, I removed all the un-needed software, the notebook sped up with each program removed. Finally perfect when done.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-03-05, 02:46:

I had Celeron 1200 socket 370, integrated GPU (in the intel chipset), 512MB on a tiny HP PC running XP on a seagate U10. Pointer moved nicely.

You might need to watch the hard drive light when you move pointer, unplug ethernet too to rule out. malware scanner off. If you have too many things installed in your add/remove programs, this also can do this. I optimized the R40 long ago that had so much bloat, using add/remove program in the system control, I removed all the un-needed software, the notebook sped up with each program removed. Finally perfect when done.

Cheers,

Thanks.
HDD doesn't blink -- the system is basically in Idle mode.
The system doesn't have any network adapters.
It was like this since clean installation. Installed apps don't feature new services -- few Benchmarks, Drivers and a Backup solution.

I also have GeForce2 Ti, will try using it.

Try the Via Hyperion 4in1 drivers, although I doubt they'll fix the issue. This is an odd one, for sure!

lafoxxx wrote:

It was like this since clean installation. Installed apps don't feature new services -- few Benchmarks, Drivers and a Backup solution.

Have you tried to increase or decrease PCI latency in BIOS? Disable AC97 codec?

cyclone3d wrote:

Basically, XP sucks with only 512MB RAM. I won't do an XP machine with less than 1GB.

That is nonsense.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-03-06, 16:12:

Have you tried to increase or decrease PCI latency in BIOS? Disable AC97 codec? […]
Show full quote

lafoxxx wrote:

It was like this since clean installation. Installed apps don't feature new services -- few Benchmarks, Drivers and a Backup solution.

Have you tried to increase or decrease PCI latency in BIOS? Disable AC97 codec?

cyclone3d wrote:

Basically, XP sucks with only 512MB RAM. I won't do an XP machine with less than 1GB.

That is nonsense.

From my experience, with the hardware of the time, XP SP2 ran fine with ~384MiB onwards and it started to fly with 768MiB. With 3,5GiB, it was smooth as silk. 😁

Edit: Oh, I forgot. The 768MiB thing was something I noticed first on a Pentium 3 733MHz. Must have been 2003/2004 or so, if memory serves.
The 3,5GiB thing was in the Pentium IV or Athlon 64 x2 era. The trick was to keep the video framebuffer size small (32MiB, 64MiB, 128MiB).

My framerate is all twtchy in WinXP.
Especially noticeable when I move my mouse in circles with constant speed (fast enough so the number of arrows increases)

That's no wonder. Win9x used ancient GDI, which can be completely accelerated by 2D cards. WinXP's GUI is based on GDI+ which is software-rendered.
It depends on the graphics hardware/driver if a "hardware cursor" for the mouse is available.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6957039/w … ow-does-it-work

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-03-06, 16:12:

Have you tried to increase or decrease PCI latency in BIOS? Disable AC97 codec? […]
Show full quote

lafoxxx wrote:

It was like this since clean installation. Installed apps don't feature new services -- few Benchmarks, Drivers and a Backup solution.

Have you tried to increase or decrease PCI latency in BIOS? Disable AC97 codec?

cyclone3d wrote:

Basically, XP sucks with only 512MB RAM. I won't do an XP machine with less than 1GB.

That is nonsense.

Nope, not nonsense. When you go into an office and all they have running is a couple browser tabs and maybe some other thing they use for their work and you see that they have 512MB RAM and there is about 16MB "free" and the drive is being hammered constantly because it is swapping stuff in/out of RAM it is a problem.

Of course it was nothing compared to when MS set the requirements for Vista super low and the OEMs sold a bunch of low end computers with Vista and only included 512MB RAM.... oh yeah, I want to spend 2-3 hours on a service call because your OEM sold you a crap computer that should never be running the OS they sold it with.

Just installed XP on a couple computers last night. Only thing running was updates that were installing and they were both using around 400MB of RAM.

Nope, not nonsense.

Nope, that's still nonsense. It's not that hard to bloat RAM with browsers and other equally unefficient stuff, but XP has nothing to do with it. XP with 512 Mb RAM was fine for gaming until late 2004-early 2005. I tinker with 512 Mb RAM XP test benches quite often without any issues. It's fine even with HDD and with SDD it's blazingly fast.

Thank you for your replies.

Whole screen area (not just Cursor) seems to be affected. Cursor is just a "tell-tale sign". When you use applications, the picture is pretty smooth, but there always are these "twitches", about 4-5 times/second.
Like if you watch TV and press "pause," and then it resumes (but it doesn't show frames which should have been shown during this pause):
1 2 3 4 4 4 7 8 9 10 11 11 11 11 15 16 17 18 18 18 21 22 23 etc.

Garrett W wrote on 2020-03-05, 09:15:

Try the Via Hyperion 4in1 drivers, although I doubt they'll fix the issue. This is an odd one, for sure!

Via 4in1 drivers already installed. Installig/uninstalling newer version didn't change anything.

No possibility to change PCI latency in BIOS. Even in latest version. AC97 and other unnecessary devices turned off (but COM ports and something similar still enabled).

Still haven't checked using different graphics card -- will reply back with results.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-03-06, 19:57:

That's no wonder. Win9x used ancient GDI, which can be completely accelerated by 2D cards. WinXP's GUI is based on GDI+ which is software-rendered.
It depends on the graphics hardware/driver if a "hardware cursor" for the mouse is available.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6957039/w … ow-does-it-work

Makes sense, but I don't remember having this issue back in the day (PIII-700, 256 RAM, GF2MX400)

Might be worth a shot / related...might be not...
But I had similar issues with performance steiffelt by using USB HIDs like keyboard and mouse. It resulted in poorly timed mouse operation as well as sometimes copy errors, but mainly steiffelt performance for botht the HIDs as well as file transfer. On some shitty chipsets, using the built in USB host controller with the aforementioned can lead to varying speed alteration and even crashes. This is expecially true with 99-2002 integrated VIA USB bridges, but also happens with Intel chipsets.

After switching to PS/2 using an adapter for the USB keyboard and relegating the USB mouse to the dedicated USB 2.0 PCI card (NEC), leaving the internal USB Host completely unoccupied, the problem vanished, with both - the file copy speed accross IDE channels reaching and staying at full speed even when input is received from the HIDs - as well as the mouse returning to full working framerate. Both are not interacting with each other now.

Maybe you have a problem with the HIDs sharing resources with important internals.

jaZz_KCS wrote on 2020-03-16, 14:39:

Might be worth a shot / related...might be not... But I had similar issues with performance steiffelt by using USB HIDs like ke […]
Show full quote

Might be worth a shot / related...might be not...
But I had similar issues with performance steiffelt by using USB HIDs like keyboard and mouse. It resulted in poorly timed mouse operation as well as sometimes copy errors, but mainly steiffelt performance for botht the HIDs as well as file transfer. On some shitty chipsets, using the built in USB host controller with the aforementioned can lead to varying speed alteration and even crashes. This is expecially true with 99-2002 integrated VIA USB bridges, but also happens with Intel chipsets.

After switching to PS/2 using an adapter for the USB keyboard and relegating the USB mouse to the dedicated USB 2.0 PCI card (NEC), leaving the internal USB Host completely unoccupied, the problem vanished, with both - the file copy speed accross IDE channels reaching and staying at full speed even when input is received from the HIDs - as well as the mouse returning to full working framerate. Both are not interacting with each other now.

Maybe you have a problem with the HIDs sharing resources with important internals.

I use PS/2 keyboard, but the mouse is connected via USB. It doesn't work with the adapter.
Will check using PS/2 mouse (or without a mouse at all), thanks for the idea.

Not fixed after disabling USB controller, Serial, COM ports

Same result with GeForce2 Ti.

Excuse me?

Is the USB mouse is via a USB to PS/2 adapter? We said need to try PS/2 moues directly.

Otherwise the motherboard is the issue due to chipset quite not right especially with XP even it got a chipset driver installed? Your has dreaded 686B southbridge which does not play well with audio card and USB cards. Are these cards physically removed?

Test with 815 chipset motherboard since you are using a 933 which requires 133 fsb.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-03-25, 19:17:

Is the USB mouse is via a USB to PS/2 adapter? We said need to try PS/2 moues directly.

Don't have PS/2 mouse. Only keyboard.
I tried with no mouse at all -- problem persists (in marquee screensaver).

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-03-25, 19:17:

Otherwise the motherboard is the issue due to chipset quite not right especially with XP even it got a chipset driver installed? Your has dreaded 686B southbridge which does not play well with audio card and USB cards. Are these cards physically removed?

Onboard AC97 and USB ports disabled in BIOS. Also tried disconnecting all PCI devices (one sound card) with USB disabled -- problem persists.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-03-25, 19:17:

Test with 815 chipset motherboard since you are using a 933 which requires 133 fsb

Ok, will try to get TUSL2-C -- never used that ISA port actually.

I've recorded a (slo-mo) video -- see the original post.