when i move my mouse around, every so often it 'drags' for a second where it stays still for a very very very small second and then it starts moving again. wtf happened, why is it doing this?
Most often that is HDD-related, at least in my experience, although it can also be caused by the processor (or a combination of the two). The processor would be an indirect cause, of course, such as a drive running in the wrong mode (PIO) or an overclocking problem (bus especially, but that doesn't happen in this day in age). I usually see this stemming directly from the hard drive, though, from a driver, setting, or cabling issue.
For example, I saw this exact symptom when Vista was filling up a ReadyBoost flash drive when I was using a single-core processor. Also saw this when one of my SATA cables was loose on a RAID. Also saw this with a specific RAID driver version during idle defragmentation. Hopefully that will help point you in the right direction.
What does your CPU utilization look like? Are you using a wireless mouse? (I have a logitech wireless setup that does this all the time, especially if you use it on a plain black surface.)
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