That annoying mouse lag that I mentioned about a week ago has become a huge irritation. I’ve even gone so far as to reinstall Arch Linux because I can’t handle the mental strain of a mouse that pauses mid-flight every four seconds.

Even more irritating is the fact that I can’t seem to trace the behavior to any one thing — dmesg shows “printk” message errors, and “eth0” errors by the dozens, but those mean nothing to me and Google.

Something is obviously missing — or impeding — my Ubuntu builds on this machine, and unless I can trace it, I might have to admit defeat and call it a hardware conflict — which would make no sense since that “hardware conflict” evaporates in Arch Linux.

For the record, this is my old Dell Latitude CPx J750GT — a 750Mhz Pentium III machine with 512Mb PC133, an 8Mb ATi Rage Mobility video card, a 20Gb Samsung hard drive, 8x dual layer NEC DVD+/-RW and an HP MO42KOA optical mouse. Wireless is via a Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA card.

If anyone has a suggestion, please feel free to make it. For now, I’m experimenting with the Arch side of life. 😉