Thinkpads Forum

I'm suffering from serious keyboard lag in some games. Certain games (usually DOS games and some, but not all, Windows games) will do it. DX vs. OGL doesn't seem to be the cause, as UT99 (DX), Racer (OGL), and Live For Speed (DX) work fine, whereas UT2004 demo (DX) and Microsoft Midtown Madness (DX) don't. And, DOS games don't use either.

The symptoms of the keyboard lag are: sometimes, keystrokes will "pile up" in the buffer, and not get applied until a few seconds later. Also, keystrokes will occasionally "stick" on for a few seconds.

It happens with both the internal keyboard and an external IBM Model M connected to a Bytecc BT-2000 USB adaptor.

These issues also happened on my old laptop. Interestingly, starting the game at one CPU speed, and then changing the CPU speed once it was running, somehow fixed the issues. I would try it on this machine, but it doesn't have SpeedStep.

Sometimes other DOS apps do it, as well. QBASIC is an offender.

Other people have suggested that I wipe the HDD and start over. That's not really an option, though...

You think there is any chance it might be the ATI Hotkey Poller service? It seems I have read some threads that it causes delays in certain things.

I'm wondering if it just developed an issue... today, I was having MAJOR problems with interrupts of all things going nuts. (I use Process Explorer. )

Tentatively... manually killing the hotkey manager might have made it less severe. It's still manifesting some, but in the 10-30% CPU utilization area rather than the 30-90% area that it was in.

Scratch that.

It's IDE related, and I hijacked someone else's thread to figure out how fix the damage I caused trying to fix it.

ATI2EVXX wasn't the cause of the mad interrupts. The cause was my HDD suddenly deciding it wanted to run in PIO mode.

Got that fixed after much swearing.

Now tried killing ATI2EVXX again... still with the keyboard issues.