Windows 7 Slowdowns and Mouse Cursor Hanging (USB related?)

This has been happening for a few months now. Towards the end of last year, I would say.

There haven't been many performance issues until then. Where my PC wouldn't have any trouble loading certain programs, it now ends up hanging when launching things like iTunes or even just loading a video in Media Player Classic Home Cinema. Firefox Quantum tends to suck up a lot of my resources, as well. The worst effect of things like this is my mouse cursor freezing up, and this almost never happened before.

After some observation, having USB devices plugged in causes some issues at the moment, and I can't figure out why. But all I usually have plugged in are my Keyboard and Mouse. Sometimes I plug in my DualShock 4 and I the notice performance of my entire PC will just drop. And after unplugging it, programs that were hard-locking my PC and my mouse cursor load just fine afterwards.

I checked my Device Manager and clicked "Scan for hardware changes". I noticed the same sort of mouse lag, as Windows 7 was scanning for new hardware. But no sort of changes afterwards.


I've cleaned up temporary files, ran maintenance, used sfc /scannow, kept my drivers up to date, with no improvements. I've even checked the SMART status of my hard drives. No problems, anything to suggest a crash.


This is an odd issue that I can't pinpoint the source for, because there's so much that could be involved. But something about the USB acting the way it is stands out. Could this be a PSU issue? My Corsair CX 500 is several years old and isn't one of the best. In fact, it's in the second to worst tier on this PSU Tier List. If any component could use an upgrade, it's that.


Can anyone help out?

Snick said:

Hi Nitesco,
Welcome to SevenForums!
Don't believe it has anything to do with you PSU.
Is your power option set to Power Saver, this can cause mouse hang issues.
Not a fan of M$ security essentials (M$SE) and don't recommend it. With that said, have you tried downloading and running Malwarebytes free? Couldn't hurt. Delete anything it finds. You can also use the premium trial version (real-time protection), compatible with M$SE.

My Power Options are set to Maximum Performance. Only power saver option I have enabled is my monitor turning off after 30 minutes. I've been running Malwarebytes Free at least once per week. No spyware found.



I have considered switching to another Anti-Virus. I've used NOD32 on Windows XP and liked how light it felt. Only reason that I haven't dropped MSE is that it's always done what I needed. But I'm open to suggestions (for a reason I'll get into below). Maybe I'll make another thread for that and get some more opinions.

After you boot into Windows, Bring up Task Manager, and let it run, minimized. When your slow down occurs, look to see what is stealing your CPU cycles. You might also consider downloading process explorer from Sysinternals.com which gives more info than Task Manager

Process Explorer is extremely helpful. I can't believe I forgot to download and install Process Explorer when I first set up my PC. Anyway, I started it up, and one thing stood out: MsMpEng.exe, described as an "Antimalware Service Executable".





It seemed to be using a lot of CPU and memory, maybe way more than it should. Seems high memory usage is a common problem for it, going by Google results. So I followed Method II in this guide that was in the top results, adding C:\Program Files\Windows Defender and C:\Program Files\Microsoft Security Client\MsMpEng.exe to MSE's exclusions.




I let Process Explorer run minimized while using Windows 7 normally. Since then, MsMpEng.exe has had much less CPU and memory usage. And no noticeable slowdowns, no mouse cursor hanging or lag, no hard locks...fnr now. I'll continue to monitor this following a Restart and checking in Safe Mode, too. I wouldn't call this Solved quite yet, but there's definitely been progress made. Thanks for the help so far.







That said, what kind of Anti-Virus needs this for a solution to stop it from eating up so much CPU and Memory? I'm looking at alternatives right now.

Sorry about responding so late. Busy with different things lately, like work.



So I switched to NOD32. It ended up finding 3 viruses that Microsoft Security Essentials couldn't catch. I'm done with MSE and will be getting a NOD32 license towards the end of this free trial. Though Windows Defender is still installed and still gets updates via Windows Update. Is there a way to turn off updates for that or just uninstall it entirely?



Performance has slightly improved since I dropped MSE. There's still mouse cursor hangs on occasion, especially if I don't do anything with my desktop for a while and then use the "Show Desktop" button on my Taskbar. Other things like opening a video in Media Player Classic Home Cinema (but not simply opening MPC-HC itself), opening iTunes, opening a folder tend to give me the same mouse cursor hang.



However, looking at Process Explorer, I'm thinking the CPU and RAM Hog this entire time has been Firefox Quantum. It's as fast as it should be, but it also seems quite bloated. To the point where it seems to be dragging down the overall PC performance just like the older Firefox did before.






I'll continue testing different things. Any suggestions would still help.

So I did some things recently that led to what might be a solution.


Switched to NOD32 entirely (Defender has been completely disabled), and I've got a 3-Year license currently active.





A week ago, I looked around and found this post on AMD's forums.
mouse and screen lag with radeon-crimson-17.7.2 | Community


A post by chzbrgla mentions monitoring processes. I was running something called CoreTemp to keep an eye on my CPU temperatures. Disabled that from Startup, and that led to slight improvements. But I'm not quite sure if that was actually the problem now, given a possible solution down below.





Because my Corsair K70 RGB Rapidfire is fairly recent (got it at the start of the year), I considered if that was part of the problem. I reduced the polling rate from 1000 to 500. Made only a slight difference. Ended up eventually returning the polling rate to 1000, since this didn't seem to be connected.



Since my PC seemed a bit "bloated", I Installed BleachBit and Wise Disk Cleaner. I wanted to try alternatives to CCleaner, maybe later than I should have, given that malware situation it had months back. BleachBit is nice and lightweight. I noticed Thumbs.db was taking up quite a bit of space, so I cleaned that along with what turned out to be a lot of Temp files (at least 2 GB).


I also took a peek at my Device Manager and found that my Intel HD Graphics under the Display Adapter section was enabled. So I disabled that, screen went black for a bit, then returned to normal. I'm not sure why it was enabled in the first place, since that's definitely not what I'm using as a primary GPU. This might be something I'll have to look into later in my BIOS.


Gave my PC a restart afterwards. Since then, the issues that I've experienced before have not occurred. I don't know if the problems have been fixed completely, but this is a vast improvement from the past months.


Improvements of note: Firefox Quantum no longer lags my whole PC after closing. The issues I've had with Media Player Classic Home Cinema and opening any sort of video (no matter the quality) have been eliminated, and videos seem to load faster now; this fits with disabling the Intel HD Graphics, I suppose. Even iTunes doesn't cause large system lag upon opening.



Overall...Something I did fixed these problems. I'm still trying to figure out what happened so I can prevent those things from happening again. More frequent cleaning with BleachBit/Wise Disk Cleaner, and defragmenting with the latter might help.


There is one weird quirk that still occurs that I've only noticed with Firefox. If I drag something from my location bar in Firefox onto my desktop or one of my folders, there is a very noticeable lag spike with my PC and Mouse (similar to what was occurring before). But nothing else now. Strange.

Agree with Snick, you may have a weak PS or have CPU over temperature.
Agree with TechnoMage2016. You have too many programs / services running on the background.

Mainly, on the back ground I have Antivirus (Download Free Antivirus for Windows 2018 | Avira ), Hardware monitor (Open Hardware Monitor - Core temp, fan speed and voltages in a free software gadget),
Firewall (Download ZoneAlarm 9.2.106.0 for Windows - OldVersion.com) and Skype (http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-full).

For malware I use SUPERAntiSpyware | Remove Malware | Remove Spyware - AntiMalware, AntiSpyware, AntiAdware! as Malwarebytes free runs on the background without protecting. If you do have Malwarebytes Premium, you don't need antivirus.