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Originally Posted by Jinn
This might seem strange but I'm voting for power supply. PSUs slowly lose both peak and sustained wattage output over time. As they lose power, they literally can only power certain peripherals at a time.
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No, your PSU isn't capable of picking favorites. It's first come first served. If it's incapable of supplying everything then your computer's going to just plain shut down because CPUs are incredibly touchy about losing power. If it was the mouse then we'd be talking about 5 volts @ 900ma absolute maximum but probably a lot closer to 5v@~200ma TOPS for any real mouse even if its got an LED instead of a laser. That's less than a quarter of a watt. If his computer is pushed over the edge of it's power supply by
less than two watts then there is no way in hell he'd ever be able to power the CPU to play music or even open firefox without the whole thing shutting down.
Just consider my old setup; I tried to run a pentium 4 and an 8800gt off of a cheap power supply while I was using about a dozen fans to keep the p4 from setting anything else in the case on fire (yep, it was a prescott). My mouse didn't shut me down, but trying to do anything that took more GPU power than basic windows use sure did. My enormous power-sucking trinitron monitor(s) running at a combined resolution of 3520x1200 stayed on the whole time though.
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Mouse movement and LCD refresh seem almost entirely unrelated, until you consider that they both require power. A mouse only needs power when it is moving (to calculate displacement from original) and I wonder if that might be just enough to temporarily suck power away from the video card.
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Like I just pointed out the
fans in his computer would take more power together than the mouse probably would. If his computer's PSU was SO DEAD that it couldnt power the mouse and monitor at the same time then it would NEVER be able to support ANY kind of CPU or GPU intensive work and would shutdown every time he tried to play a game, watch a youtube video, or load something.
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The intermittent nature of it makes me think it's even more likely, and the fact that you've got dual output is an even bigger draw on power. VGA (D-SUB) takes less GPU cycles than does DVI, and would require less V, strictly speaking.
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Again: No. Ever see those dvi->dsub adapters that you just screw onto the end of the monitor cord? Your videocard does not know or care the difference when you use those, the only time it notices a difference is when using a DVI-D connection and says "Yo, I'm all-digital, stop running the signal through the DAC and save yourself some work" and then it's DVI that's easier since it doesn't need to convert it to an analog signal.
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If you've got a multimeter, you might want to check the pins and see what their voltages are. I bet you're not seeing anywhere near +5V and +12V at the same amperage as when it was new. You could also try harvesting another power supply if you have one, just to see if the problem goes away.
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There is no such thing as amperage, also as I've said once or twice now if you were in such bad shape that the ~.100 of a watt that the mouse draws was causing things to lose power I think he would be having more problems.
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I'd also expect it to be more likely to happen the greater your memory footprint. Open tons of programs that consume a lot of hard drive time (reads/writes) or RAM swapping (music does this well) and I bet it occurs more frequently - the ram and HD spike in their power draw during those times.
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Really hot DDR3 runs at 3 volts tops and once again if his power supply was so dead the mouse was overdrawing it then he wouldn't even be able to boot up his computer because a harddrive spinning up when you power on is the single largest power draw that hard drive will ever make, that's why if you have 5+ hard drives in some giant RAID array you need a beefy power supply even if you aren't using a beefy graphics card.
Plus once again the CPU and GPU would individually be FAR greater power draws when they started working hard than his ram and hdd would ever be even put together. Your CPU and GPU don't draw their full load all the time, they draw only what they need at a given moment. Start calculating prime numbers and rendering HDR video and it's going to draw a lot more power than playing minesweeper on your desktop.
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If it's really tied to mouse movement, it really can't have anything to do with the cabling..
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Yes, yes it can. It's called "interference" if it's coming from outside and "bad cables" if it's the cables or plugs. As an example of the former (these things don't exist in a vacuum) ask yourself why do you think there are rules built into the standards about wiring? Why do cables have insulation? It's not to keep them from catching a cold, it's to deal with interference.