USB is very CPU intensive. USB mouse doesnt send any data on its own, it waits for the system to poll it. Is whole system freezing for couple seconds or just the mouse?
if its optical mouse look if the LED underneath turns off when this happens.

Definitely fix PS2 bracket situation and forget about USB on pre ~1998 systems.

I ran into this a lot back in the day with VIA chipsets. Both mobo chipsets and usb chipsets. Sometimes shuffling around the PCI IRQs helped. I ran into this the most when using PCI sound cards /w PCI USB card back in the late 90s.

The system seems like its loading the program fine. I just can't move the mouse for a few seconds. I might try assigning a different IRQ for the onboard 1.1 USB. I can't find any ps/2 risers for a P5A-B . I may try an older ball mouse with a ps/2 to usb adapter if my PCI USB 2.0 card doesn't do any better. Is there other generic mouse drivers besides the factory HID compliant mouse driver?

PCI USB 2.0 will slow whole computer down at least 10% while doing nothing, with jut mouse plugged in Which USB 2.0 cards for old motherboards

>I can't find any ps/2 risers for a P5A-B

buy the one you can find and swap pins according to manual

Also, PS/2 mice will work during setup and in Safe Mode with Windows 98.

Have you enabled DMA for the hard disk controllers? Disk access can cause the cursor to hang during certain operations as the operating system performs cooperative multitasking.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-03-09, 09:06:

Have you enabled DMA for the hard disk controllers? Disk access can cause the cursor to hang during certain operations as the operating system performs cooperative multitasking.

I bet that's it. When I don't have DMA enabled and run a disk benchmark program, the mouse completely freezes, I can barely do anything until it's finished. It also makes the mouse freeze in games every few seconds when it's loading data from the hard disk.

Swapping hardware will sometimes cause the DMA checkbox to untick. I always notice this when I see my mouse start to lag.

I have ultra dma mode set to auto and onboard pci ide enable set to both. I am using a fastrak s150 pci to sata adapter and a 120gb ssd. It does seem to only do it when accessing files that aren’t cached. Everything else runs pretty smooth.

You need to open the device in win98 device manager to turn on dma there, I think you are just describing your bios setup right?

That doesn't seem right. I never experience this issue when using CompactFlash cards. I'm assuming that you have drivers installed for the SATA adapter?

I don't know what you mean by "auto". Are you talking about the BIOS? DMA mode is enabled from the disk controller in Device Manager.

Although I don't think that it's related, I noticed that you're using an FX 5600. That is too new of a video card for a K6 and you're losing a lot of FPS to driver overhead. Anything less than a Coppermine with SSE is going to tank in performance with the newer drivers required to run these cards.

This seems relevant:

Strange DOS game incompatibility with my GeForce 2 Ultra

It’s not uncommon on older systems to have the mouse be a bit laggy when the computer is doing a lot, freezing for 10 solid seconds sounds a little excessive but in general when the computer was doing a lot it wasn’t uncommon for the mouse to be impacted.

I disagree. This shouldn't be a problem with disk access if DMA is functioning correctly. His system is a K6 not a 386.

midicollector wrote on 2024-03-13, 01:42:

It’s not uncommon on older systems to have the mouse be a bit laggy when the computer is doing a lot, freezing for 10 solid seconds sounds a little excessive but in general when the computer was doing a lot it wasn’t uncommon for the mouse to be impacted.

This is a bad take. This isn't s a 286. I never experienced mouse lag in the Socket 7 era except for weird driver/config issues as I mentioned higher up.

CPU speed isn't the limiting factor here. I experienced the same mouse lag while trying to get Windows 98 working on an nForce 2 motherboard with a fast Athlon 64.

Windows 98 installation on nForce 430 hanging during detection of plug and play devices

The problem is missing/broken DMA and disk I/O clobbering the system.

I installed the Ali AGP and Ali IDE drivers which seemed to help a little. I still had a 1-2 second delay when I open file explorer or anytime the cd drive spins up. There are no hard disk drives in the device manager to enable DMA. Only the SCSI FastTrak S150 controller which doesn't have any additional options.

While i was in device manager i disabled the primary IDE because I am only running a CD drive on the secondary IDE. Now the mouse doesn't freeze when I open file explorer. I will have to do some more testing tonight. I may also disable ultra dma in the bios since I am using a sata controller not an ide hdd.

I also need to experiment with only 256mb of ram and disabling the L3 cache on the motherboard but I don't know if that is related.

You can enable DMA for optical drives as well.

Now it is running very smoothly. I don’t know why disabling the primary ide channel in the device manager helped. I also set the onboard usb irq to 12 but I am pretty sure that is what is uses anyways. I was about to change the irq of the sata controller or move it to a different slot. I also thought the pci sound card might be the interfering. I have read that some socket 7 motherboards prefer isa sound card.

The agp slot runs well at 2x turbo mode with GAT 2 enabled. I also plan on upping the fsb from 95 to 100 or 110 which might help when disabling the external cache.

It ran the best with only 1 stick of 256mb pc133 with external cache enabled. Supposedly disabling the external cache will allow you to use more ram but I still had a small performance hit with 512 or 768.

adam731432 wrote on 2024-03-14, 02:42:

Now it is running very smoothly. I don’t know why disabling the primary ide channel in the device manager helped. I also set the […]
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Now it is running very smoothly. I don’t know why disabling the primary ide channel in the device manager helped. I also set the onboard usb irq to 12 but I am pretty sure that is what is uses anyways. I was about to change the irq of the sata controller or move it to a different slot. I also thought the pci sound card might be the interfering. I have read that some socket 7 motherboards prefer isa sound card.

The agp slot runs well at 2x turbo mode with GAT 2 enabled. I also plan on upping the fsb from 95 to 100 or 110 which might help when disabling the external cache.

It ran the best with only 1 stick of 256mb pc133 with external cache enabled. Supposedly disabling the external cache will allow you to use more ram but I still had a small performance hit with 512 or 768.

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Glad you got it working. I definitely had lots of issues with non-intel S7 chipsets and PCI soundcards back in the day. Lots of audio stuttering and random freezes. IIRC AMD Slot-A chipsets were the worst offender. Ironlake or something? I HATED building machines with those chipsets and PCI sound cards for customers.