ASUS P6T SE - Blue Screen, lagging mouse pointer, system crash and other oddities July 2010

This was an odd one. I built myself a new computer with the ASUS P6T SE, Intel i7 and everything else that is plugged on to the main board. The problems started immediately.

Symptoms:
  1. The system would run fine for a while, but then the mouse pointer would start to lag. With this I mean I would move the mouse and a second later the pointer would jump to the new position.
  2. So I swapped the mouse from a USB to a PS/2. No more problems with the mouse pointer, but the system would simply blue screen after a while.

Obviously, when you build a new machine yourself, this is the last thing you want: No guarantee, no idea what's wrong and all solutions agro and potentially expensive.

Solution:

Eventually I worked it out, and it was simple....

The USB mouse was connected through a USB hub. On the same hub there were two external hard drives. On my old computer I had the same configuration, and the old main board was also an ASUS (P5K), so it didn't occur to me that this could be the problem.

The USB hub is an active hub. I never bothered to power it up before. The old P5K board had no problem, but with the new P6T board, the external hard drives were sucking so much power from the main board that the system crashed. The mouse pointer effect was a visual indication of the power drain.

Now at this point I realize some readers may think "Yeh, that was obvious". Well it wasn't for me. In my case it had always worked fine before, and since I built the computer myself, my first thoughts were - I've bought a duff component (and my Hard Drive actually was duff), I've damaged something while building it and oh my god !

As it turns out, since then I've heard of a few ASUS P6T users and other main board users who have had similar problems, and it has usually been a power problem. My Power Supply is more than enough for the P6T i7, but others have had duff or too weak power supplies. So I would personally recommend with problems like these to start with the power supply, and as in my case it can be as simple as an active USB hub used as a passive hub.

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