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Rico Muerte

macrumors member
Original poster
May 19, 2020
70
12
Sydney, Australia
Got a 2012 non retina MBP:

Screen Shot 2021-05-15 at 12.22.47 pm.png


Noticed a weird thing yesterday - when I went to do a 1st time machine backup via FW800, the trackpad/cursor glitched out & became almost completely unusable.
It was tremendously laggy & mostly unresponsive while the FW800 drive was plugged in.
Plugging in a logitec gaming USB mouse resolved the issue (using the mouse obviously).

Anyone experienced or heard of something similar?
 

Rico Muerte

macrumors member
Original poster
May 19, 2020
70
12
Sydney, Australia
Following up - did a TM backup again with the same configuration as above & the same issue occurred during the backup process - I had to plug in a USB mouse in order to be able to use the mouse cursor.

Once the backup was completed & I unplugged FW800 drive, trackpad operation returned to normal.
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
29,278
13,376
Electromagnetic interference from the firewire cable/connection...?

Or... something about the backup was hogging the MBP's CPU, or otherwise slowing down the OS?

In any case, you have "found the workaround" -- use the Logitech mouse when you have the FW drive connected.

Just wondering... does the MBP still have the factory-installed, platter-based hard drive?
 

Rico Muerte

macrumors member
Original poster
May 19, 2020
70
12
Sydney, Australia
Electromagnetic interference from the firewire cable/connection...?

Or... something about the backup was hogging the MBP's CPU, or otherwise slowing down the OS?

In any case, you have "found the workaround" -- use the Logitech mouse when you have the FW drive connected.

Just wondering... does the MBP still have the factory-installed, platter-based hard drive?
Would be very strange if the FW connection was producing some sort of interference with the trackpad...surely I wouldnt be the 1st to experience it or complain? And yes I know FW is old & outdated technology...

Rest of the MBPs function is as normal & nothing it showing as CPU intensive in iStat.

The original 5400rpm drive is out - a 500Gb SSD has replaced it, & a 1TB SSD has replaced the optical drive...could that have something to do with it...? ?
 
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