VunderWife has a Win 8 based Lenovo PC, with a USB connected mouse and keyboard pair. The issue is system lag with either mouse movements or keystrokes, sometimes to the point that the system is unusable.
I’ve tried several times to diagnose and fix the issue. Reinstalled the drivers, looked for CPU hogs in the Task Manger and removed them, and also eliminated a couple instances of multiple processes. All of these provided a slight increase in response time, but not enough. Any ideas where I should look next?
FWIW, the PC is Lenovo and the USB keyboard/mouse set is Logitech.
Has it always been laggy or is this a new symptom?
Generally speaking, a lot of mouse/keyboard lag issues are related to using manufacturer’s older drivers. Sometimes switching to Microsoft Windows 8 drivers fixes it.
There are also issues with some graphics drivers not working well. Again, switching to one of the Windows 8 drivers sometimes fixes it.
Another problem could be malware.
What have you already found? What was hogging the CPU that you already killed? What processes did you kill?
New symptoms as of January. The PC and keyboard as a set had been around at least a year before the troubles started.
The trashed app was TeamViewer. It caused memory issues on my Android tablet, and I would routinely find 4 instances of it in the running processes on her PC. I would use it to fix other issues she had as they occured. I also dumped a suspicious camera app that I later found to be legit.
Are the keyboard and mouse wireless/bluetooth? If so, test it with wired; if that helps either their batteries are down, there’s something in the way or her (physical) desktop, or the wireless/bluetooth hardware’s faulty.
And yes, run at least two different malware detection suites, see the sticky thread at the top of this forum.
Is it a touchscreen Windows 8 laptop? I’ve seen instances at work with similar symptoms. Windows 8 is, for better or worse, optimized for touch. Lenovo uses the Synaptics touch pad. Have you updated that driver as well? Even though the lag is with the USB mouse and kb it could be from the Synaptics driver.
Found the problem. After realizing the symptoms showed up only after her browser was opened, I discovered she had multiple copies of two different plug-ins loaded. After disabling all but one of both, it runs fine.
It was what I suspected, multiple software loads, but I was looking for it at the Windoze level instead.
It only applies to the tablet-style apps. If an app is not on screen, it will be suspended after 5 seconds. At least, that’s how it worked in Windows 8 RTM.
True, BUT, 8.1 does not like a lot of the drivers for 8.0. When I upgraded, my laptop started running like crap, and even the installed software was crap. I upgraded the video driver, and it all got a lot better. I did that at the NVIDIA site, then I upgraded some motherboard drivers at the manufacturer’s site. Now it actually works better than it did when I got it, with 8.0
Me too. I rendered an HD video in the background last night while I did a load of other stuff including work on documents, email, web, etc - probably had a dozen windows open. No noticeable drop in performance.
That makes sense. I can’t think of very many scenarios where you would want an inactive Modern UI App to keep running - Apps aren’t generally that kind of thing.