For months I was suffering from terminal keyboard and mouse lag when trying to to play Half Life 2. The keyboard would seem to lock up momentarily which often meant I would glide forward even after I had stopped pressing any keys and the mouse would become unresponsive. As this coincided with a graphics card upgrade and had seen something in the Source FAQ about keyboard lag I presumed it was just some weird config thang. Time went on and nothing I did seemed to help. I then noticed it was happening in every single game I tried no matter how low the graphics settings were.

I finally gave up and swapped my old graphics card back in.

No difference.

Googled once more and found a post suggesting killing off a Logitech task. I don’t have a Logitech anything but it gave me the somewhat belated idea of wiping out all extraneous processes. So I did. With extreme prejudice.

Well, what do you know. It was gosh darn Google Desktop.

Yup. Google Desktop. It seems they can afford to pay $1.6bn for a boatload of skanky video clips and its zombie teenage passengers but they can’t write a routine that detects a double control key click without messing up the entire input buffer for everyone else.

Posted in the hope that other poor lagged out souls (and it seems that we are Legion) may find and be comforted.

December 26th, 2006 | AllReallyBad, OFFS