Weird Mouse Issue
Hi! Recently I've been having a strange problem with my Logitech G5. When I'm playing T2, the mouse sometimes just turns off for several seconds. This is really annoying, as it renders me practically helpless and disrupts any skiing/flying I was doing. Usually it comes back on its own, but occasionally I have to unplug it and plug it back in. This happens as often as 3 times a minute or as little as once in ten minutes. Whenever I am doing something else (browsing the web, playing other games) on my Windows XP (sp3) partition, the same thing happens maybe once every other hour. I have yet to see it happen on my OS X partition (I play on an ~1 year old 13" MacBook Pro).
As an experiment, I plugged my mouse into a USB splitter that has a red light when active. When my mouse turned off, the splitter was still on, so my USB ports aren't dying. I also tried reinstalling T2 and using the XP system recovery thing where you reset your system settings to an earlier date, but to no avail. Any suggestions?
As an experiment, I plugged my mouse into a USB splitter that has a red light when active. When my mouse turned off, the splitter was still on, so my USB ports aren't dying. I also tried reinstalling T2 and using the XP system recovery thing where you reset your system settings to an earlier date, but to no avail. Any suggestions?
Comments
What is the video card and vid card driver version?
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 9400m
Driver: I'm not 100% sure this is the right thing, but this is what DxDiag said: "Main driver: nv4_disp.dll Version: 6.14.0011.8575 (English)"
Sorry to hear that
Also, I actually never even bothered to install the software that came with my mouse. Does yours work okay without it, or do you need the extra features?
Cool! That's a completely separate problem, but it's actually one that I do have occasionally. So annoying when it happens just as I'm coming in to grab the flag >.< . I'll have to try that fix out. Thanks!
As far as the problem with my mouse, that's definitely not it (my mouse in fact turns off - the little sensitivity light on the top goes off, while the game continues to run and I can move around with the arrow keys). Sure, my mouse could just be dying, but I find it very bizarre that the frequency with which the problem occurs varies so much between playing T2, playing another Windows game, and doing stuff on my OS X partition. If I could achieve either of the latter two frequencies while playing T2 (once every ~2 hours or never), I wouldn't consider it a big deal. As it stands, though, completely losing all mouse control in game twice in one minute is pretty darn annoying.
But I like my pretty G5 :'(. In all seriousness, though, I guess this is an option if nobody comes up with anything. I could have a "T2" mouse and use my G5 as an "everything else" mouse :P
Changing the Usb port of both devices seems to have done the trick. Dont know if the problem still persists if I were to change back, though
Razer mouse
@ Blakhart: I tried updating my video card driver to see if would solve the issue where the whole game hangs for a second, but when I did so I could no longer run T2 in my preferred resolution of 960*600. All the other options either make the HUD/menu elements way too big, way too small, or they distort the game unless I run in windowed mode (and my screen is already small enough as it is). Also, using anything besides that resolution messes up my HUDmanager settings. Do you know why the newer driver won't let me play in 960*600 mode?
$pref::Video::resolution = "960 600 32";
give that a shot, but window mode is all sorts of evil
as to why the driver refused your demand for the evil window mode, I've no clue other than drivers giveth and drivers taketh away
I have settled on the nvid 180.48 for my 8800gts as this driver have no code for the older vector rendering cards (pre g80) and seem to run as well as the newest drivers, but I give up things like card accelerated flash movies and so on for a driver written for scalar cards, I can live with that. So if you ever feel like experimenting, get a copy of the 180.48s and see how goes it. Also, when changing drivers run a driver cleaner and a registry cleaner after you run the os program remover.
1 uninstall vid card driver in normal mode - not safe mode
2 when sys reboots force safe mode (F8) and run driver cleaner and registry cleaner, reboot
3 install new driver in normal mode then reboot
4 change desktop res and so on, play a game or two to check performance
5 reboot once more
6 heat and serve
Anisotropic filtering:
Most nvid cards from the 6800 on can handle a good deal of anisotropic filtering, up to 16x in most cases. Anisotropic filtering makes lines stay focused as they trail off into the distance, the game is much more sharply focused at a distance.
Antialiasing:
Set this to no more than 2x to clean up most of the jaggies. This setting is the single greatest performance killer in video cards today. What it controls is how the images on screen are filtered by the card, the card renders the image in memory, increases the resolution a few times, filters it, and the brings it back down to the resolution of your screen and spits the frame out. What this means is huge demands on memory bandwidth with all the traffic on the cards memory bus. This is the single fps killer, so keep that setting low. Also, in the antialiasing transparency setting, set it to supersampling. Multisampling is way faster, but it doesn't look much better than with no antialiasing at all compared to supersampling. The test is to set to multisampling, join a game, and look at the leaves of a tree from a few feet away. Then drop, change to supersampling, and go back in the game to a tree and look at the elaves again. You will see the leaves are much more appealeing, and everyone wants t2 leaves that are appealing, right? I mean, who doesnt spend hours looking at the leaves on foliage in t2?
set the threaded optimisation in the control panel (if the opstion is there) to off for t2 either globaly or in game profiles or a stuttery game may be had - t2 is single threaded as far as the actual game loop goes so it will not benefit from dual smp/multicore systems
i have seen this setting enabled work ok in sli systems however
In addition, my new driver seems to be causing me problems - I now get the blue screen of death any time I try to watch a video online (including but not limited to youtube). What happens is that the sound plays, but the video part is all black. Then horizontal black bars of varying heights flash briefly across the screen, then the audio hangs, and then it crashes. This began happening after I installed the updated driver, and continued happening even when I reverted to my previous driver and system restored back to August. I'm not sure why my video card driver would cause the video to be all black, but the bars across the entire screen definitely look like a video card-related thing. HELP!
http://www.memtest.org/
even better:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
has oodles of neato apps for hardware testing
Thanks for all the optimization tips and help, Blakhart. If I have any similar problems in the near future I'll be sure to run one of those memory tests and see if it comes up with anything.
After discovering that all G5s sold in the US have a three year warranty (I've had mine for ~2.5 years), I e-mailed Logitech. They e-mailed back, asking for information on the bottom of my mouse, a picture of my receipt, and my address. Then they sent me a brand new G500 (which actually costs more than what I payed for my G5) free of charge. I didn't even have to return the pseudo-functional G5 (although the problem has gotten so bad that it's hardly usable). Logitech mice may have some issues, but their customer service rocks!
Hence the "unlikely."
Maybe it would be more accurate if I changed it to "extremely unlikely" :P