Windows 95 brought a lot of high-level features to the desktop, but it also came with its fair share of performance problems, (especially on 386 systems with only 4 MB of RAM). When an operation dragged on for too long, it could seem like the whole system had fallen into a deep well... until the user moved the mouse cursor. Why did that happen? A group of users on Stack Exchange shared some very interesting answers.
Today, Windows 95 is lightweight and undemanding, more of a technical curiosity than anything else. Some fans have put it online, while others have turned it into an app.
Personally, I recommend a virtualizer or installing it on an old system to reproduce the pure experience, which, by the way, will let you get to know its most important quirks.
One of those quirks is quite curious: if you install a somewhat heavy program in Windows 95, you can speed up the whole process by moving the mouse cursor.
No Alt+Tab or other shortcuts, just... moving the cursor. Why does that happen? What's going on? Is it a hardware issue, a driver issue, or the operating system itself?
Moving the Cursor to Speed Up Windows 95
The discussion arose on Stack Exchange and one of the most voted answers explains that there is a flaw (let's call it a bug) in the way Windows 95 generates events, and many applications compatible with the operating system depend on them.
In fact, these applications often use asynchronous I/O: they request an operation (say, copying a file) and tell the operating system that they can be placed on standby until that operation finishes.
This behavior is very useful, as it allows other applications to run instead of wasting time and resources on the CPU.
The problem is that Windows 95 tends to accumulate I/O messages and does not wake up applications immediately. However, the operating system wakes them up correctly when a user action is registered, in this case, moving the cursor.
Moving the cursor forces Windows 95 and the application to process I/O messages faster, drastically reducing the delay (from an hour to 15 minutes in extreme examples).
Another user suggests that the error is not the responsibility of the operating system, but of programs based on an event processing loop.
If some decision paths of the loop only process one event at a time, what happens is that when two simultaneous events are generated, one is resolved and the other gets trapped. Moving the cursor only generates new events, purges, and restarts the loop.
In summary, moving the mouse in Windows 95 makes it faster under certain activities because it keeps event processing fluid.
If you're interested in learning more about Windows 95 and speed, why not try to break its installation record? We even have some speedruns recorded....
