After running Windows 7 in qemu/kvm with spice for a while
i discovered there is horrible delay / sluggish experience when holding the Arrow keys on keyboard.
Especially when working in cmd and programming often we need to seek the cursor around using arrow keys. so this problem gets very annoying.
At first i thought it was qemu or spice fault, however, after some Googling it appears that Windows itself is at fault.
Here is how to fix it:
a. Start, Run, “Regedit”
b. Tunnel to this key:
Hkey_LocalMachine/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/i8042prt/Parameters
c. On the detail side, “other-mouse-click” a blank area and add a new Dword-32 value. Name the key “PollStatusIterations” (no quotes)
Set value to Hex = 1
Caution, there are other registry keys with similar names.
d. Close Regedit and reboot.
e. If this value is already in the Registry, disable the key by renaming it to “xxPollStatusIterations” Reboot and test.
Reference:
http://serverfault.com/questions/624690/windows-guest-on-kvm-qemu-suffers-horrible-key-lag
http://keyliner.blogspot.se/2009/11/windows-7-slow-keyboard-response.html
Thank you so much for posting this. My cursor keys stopped repeating in Windows 10 guest in QEMU some time ago (using QEMU 2.7.0 currently). For example, holding down right arrow key only moved the cursor one character to the right. Other keys seemed to work fine – e.g. holding down “x” produced a row of xxx… in Word as expected. I’m not sure when exactly this happened. I used to run both Windows 7 and 10 in QEMU without such problems.
After adding the “PollStatusIterations” key to the registry, the cursors started to work again. They are still noticeably laggy, but Word is much more pleasant to use.