High CPU usage with Mouse Movements  

Dear members:

First of all let me briefly present the current configuration of my "very old" system:
* Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
* Asus P5K Premium Black Pearl Edition
* OCZ DDR2 PC-6400 800 MHz Reaper HPC Edition CL4 (8 GB)
* Nvidia GeForce GT630
* Dell U2413 monitor
* Disk C: Crucial MX500 250 GB
* Disk D: Western Digital Blue 1 TB
* Mouse: Microsoft IntelliMouse Pro (2019 version)
* Windows 10 64 bit

One month ago, with the end of support of Windows 7, I decided to install Windows 10 (clean install, from the scratch).

All the process went crystal clear, except for one point: every time I moved the mouse, over the desktop, over the windows file explorer or over a program (windows, adobe, etc.), the CPU usage skyrocketed to 60%, 70%, 80% or even more! The problem was even worse when I was seeing a YouTube video and/or a video with the windows player or with the MHC media player classic, with the mouse becoming erratic and choppy..

In all these situtions the CPU went crasy with temperatures exceeding 90-95 degrees centigrade (never seen before with Windows 7).

I've tried literally all the "solutions" available on the internet (google, youtube, specialized forums, etc.), with no favorable results. It's important to stress that this mouse abnormal behavior was never present with Windows 7.

Curiously, this problem does not happen with previous versions of the Microsoft Intellimouse (I've tested with Intellimouse 3.0 and 4.0), only with the brand new Intellimouse Pro 2019.

After a lot of guessing I decided to open the Mouse and Keyboard Center application (version 12.181.137.0) that you should install with the Microsoft IntelliMouse Pro. Then I took some experiments, working with 2 different parameters of the mouse performance:
* DPI Configuration (was 1600 by default)
* Performance Configuration (Polling Rate was 1000 by default)

I started decreasing the DPI Configuration from 1600 to 800, with a decrease of CPU usage from 60-70% to 35%. A good result but not enough yet.

Then I started decreasing Polling Rate from 1000 to 500 (with a decrase of CPU usage to 19%) and then proceeded to a decrease to 125.

Bingo! The CPU usage decrased to a normal 5-6%!

The mouse DPI measures how sensitive a mouse is. The higher a mouse’s DPI, the farther the cursor on your screen will move when you move the mouse.

The mouse Polling Rate determines how often your mouse reports its position to the PC. In this case, my mouse with a 125 Hz polling rate, will report its position to the PC 125 times every second, intead of 1000 every second with the default value. Higher polling rates will use more CPU resources as the CPU has to query the mouse for its position more often!

Maybe, with new processors and motherboards this problem goes unnoticed. However, even knowing that the solution I propose may not be interesting for gamers, it may help a lot people like me that have old PCs, working very well with Windows 7, but obtaining high CPU usage with Windows 10.

All the best,

Mico.

I rarely use Microsoft mice but it is good to know! Thanks for sharing.

Let me just comment that I also have 2 quad core intel CPUs, on a VERY old (10 years) Dell machine. When I consider what my machine needs to do to mix down 30 tracks of digital audio, each with multiple digital audio processing plugins, and that it accomplishes this task in just milliseconds with hardly a 10-15% overall CPU load, the scenario you're describing of 1000 mouse reports / second seems very trivial. There must be a software bug in the driver causing each of those individual reports to BLOCK the CPU, making it wait in some kind of tight loop for a result. In modern programming methods that would be completely ridiculous, which is why it's likely an unforeseen bug. But that said, I don't see hardware as Microsoft's "forte", and I would suggest completely ditching that mouse. Consider instead something like a trusty Logitec M185 wireless optical mouse. One tiny receiver takes up a USB port, and I'll bet you have trouble free operation with zero visible CPU cores spikes when viewed on the task manager "performance" ta (, even while racing the mouse back and fourth like a madman.)

In general I always advocate shying away from Microsoft Hardware peripherals (keyboards, cameras, mouse, etc), in favor of 3rd party manufacturers like Logitec. The plain facts are, these companies want their products to work flawlessly with no special drivers, and no particular OS versions. Microsoft, on the other hand, has no problem locking their hardware products into specific OEM drivers, even insisting on things like "minimum windows versions". Not the usual case with 3rd party add ons. You can also find a mouse like I described on ebay dirt cheap, and with no moving parts in a modern mouse, used will be as good as new. With no special settings and the generic OS driver, I'll bet you'll not be able to measure any CPU usage change with movement.

To fix the issue you can either uninstall Microsoft Intellipoint and just use the mouse without software, or uninstall the software, restart and reinstall the latest version for your mouse. Also you may need to update the chipset (USB) drivers just in case there is some incompatibility causing the lag.