Question Format speed depended on mouse movement in Win98. Explanation?

[Pimpom]

Back in the days of Win98, I was puzzled to see that the time taken to format a partition varied widely - from a few seconds to minutes. This was not a one-off incident, nor was it related to drive size and health. I was working with and on many computers then and it happened with healthy drives and partitions of comparable sizes. The variations even occurred with the same partition on the same HDD.

Then I found that the formatting proceeded slowly if I kept the mouse still, and rapidly if I kept it moving, doing nothing but move around the screen. The format speed was roughly proportional to the speed of the mouse movement.

I never found an explanation for this behaviour. Does anyone know?

 

[kerberos_20]

holding ctrl key had about same effect...i used it on 16bit apps in windowed mode (commandline)

 

[Pimpom]

I did a bit of searching after starting the thread. I didn't find an explanation specific to the format process but this link is probably pointing in the right direction:
https://retrocomputing.stackexchang...e-cursor-cause-windows-95-to-run-more-quickly