Tim:
A system too slow to handle a mouse? How can it ever manage the other *far* more complex tasks?
Roger Heflin:
To get 20ms of delay you would only need a tiny bit of paging every so often or a bit of cpu contention so that it delays your time slice because something is on the cpu the kernel wants to schedule you on..
I'm staggered. On a system that runs at 1,000,000,000 cycles per second (picking 1 GHz as a very conservative modern speed), which can be stated as 0.000,000,001 of a second per cycle, hardware (or Gnome?) can bog things down by that much?!
My 30 year old 16 MHz Amiga had no trouble whizzing the mouse about while taxing the system with other things.
I've got some old punch cards still laying around, if my PC is feeling a bit to stressed by me using the peripherals...