Why does my excel window lag so much when moved around the screen? no other app windows have the problem

Todd, there can be multiple problems (with different fixes) that have the similar symptoms.  OK, in your case the mouse is not the cause. Have you looked at the other suggested fixes?

For example, I'm sure "Hardware Acceleration" has been mentioned. Have you tried that?

Reducing the number of cores used by Excel may or may not help, depending on the cause of the problem. If the problem is caused by Windows not getting enough computer resources outside of Excel, then yes, reducing cores dedicated to Excel would help.  But given your one-line problem description it sounds like the problem could be excel itself. And if the problem in Excel is in a single processing "thread", then the number of cores would not be relevant.

When I disable hardware acceleration, lagging gets jumpy and worse. Excel could be a multi-threaded app on multiple cores. Honestly, I'm not sure how Windows or Excel is architected.

One new observation.. the window drag acts like the position is passed through a low pass filter. Like the distance algorithm is accumulating. It does act like a mouse pointer problem, but I have a cheap mouse. Plus only Microsoft office apps are affected.

Todd

Excel is programmed to do multi-threaded calculations. But, some things are single threaded.  Other than that I have no access to the innards of Excel.

Submit your problem to MS as a feedback bug report. The more people reporting a problem, and the more clues / insights / symptoms they provide, the more likely MS is to act on the problem and maybe find a solution.

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Send Feedback to MS Developers ****Launch Feedback Hub via  <WIN><F>

“Official” MS does not pay much attention to this forum. However, you now can send your complaints and feature requests directly to MS developers and managers using one of the 4 possible “Feedback” mechanisms described in this link:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-windows_install/send-feedback-to-ms-developers/506e7654-8ced-405b-911e-c58d8f253069

Please post a share link to your feedback, back here, so other people who find your question will be able to vote for it and add their comments to it.

Collection of MS “UserVoice” web links:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wiki/windows\_10-desktop/ms-suggestion-box-sites-at-usdervoicecom/7397119c-6d48-49e6-8d94-7bd0a50d214f

MS Feedback article, says basically the same thing:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4021566/windows-10-send-feedback-to-microsoft-with-feedback-hub

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Here are a few links about multi-thread (formula) processing in Excel. Not directly related to your problem, but may be of interest to you

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2017 01 07 About Excel's "Enable multi-threaded processing" option 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2696967/about-excel-s-enable-multi-threaded-processing-option  

Excel's "multi-threaded processing" option was first introduced in Microsoft Office Excel 2007. The setting is located in Excel Options | Advanced | General. It is enabled by default but must have a capable processor to be utilized.

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ET MR Macros.docx 2013 05 08- How to enable Multi-Threading feature in Excel 2013 to speedup calculations? May 8, 2013            Laura Jones

https://techglimpse.com/enable-multithreading-feature-excel-2013-speedup-calculations/

Microsoft Excel 2013 comes with a Multi-threading feature that can reduce the time taken to calculate complex formulas. If you have multiple processors in your computer, then turning On this feature will let Excel to make use of multiple processors to perform the calculations faster. What if your computer doesn’t feature multiple processors? Then you can follow this guide to disable automatic calculations performed whenever you open a worksheet or make any changes to the formulas. For the rest who own powerful computer, here’s how you can enable Multi-Threading feature.

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ET MR Macros.docx2012 12 19- About Excel's "Enable multi-threaded processing" optionhttps://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2696967

Excel's "multi-threaded processing" option was first introduced in Microsoft Office Excel 2007. It is enabled by default but must have a capable processor to be utilized. The "Enable multi-threaded processing" setting controls multi-threaded operations other than calculation. These include multi-threaded sort, row height calculations, and finding the best fit for column widths. Additionally: this setting is not available in the Object Model for use in VBA. More information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb687899.aspx Multithreaded Recalculation in Excel

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ET MR Macros.docx 2012 04 19- Multithreaded Recalculation in Excelhttps://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb687899.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

Office 2013 and later       Last modified: April 19, 2012****Microsoft Office Excel 2007 was the first version of Excel to use multithreaded recalculation (MTR) of worksheets. You can configure Excel to use up to 1024 concurrent threads when recalculating, regardless of the number of processors or processor cores on the computer.

ET MR Macros.docx

Thank you.

Did you try my suggestion of altering your polling rate? Even if you don't have a 'gaming' mouse, this could still be the culprit, and there are still ways to alter the polling rate to see if it will fix it for you.

Check this link to see what your polling rate is to begin with.

Then:

• If you use Window's driver for your mouse, try installing the proper software for your mouse so you can change the polling rate
• If you can't do that, try downloading a mouse rate adjusting program, you can find some on Tom's Hardware and simply adjust to a lower rate to see if it helps.