Mouse movement in Windows 8/8.1 sucks...

I've tried a wireless travel mouse, a standard USB mouse and my Logitech G5 gaming mouse.

The button inputs don't get recognized 1/3rd to 1/2 the time and the movement is wishy-washy, it feels like I constantly have to deal with varying sensitivity speeds.... hence why one of the reasons I rarely play anymore.

I am on a laptop though which may have something to do with it but I doubt that.

switch to gnu/Linux

windows vista defaults to DEP enabled (XP defaults to off). This can break vanilla software rendering (unless the code is fixed to use the correct argument).

various graphics drivers expose more than 1024 bytes of extension strings. this can break glquake engines that do not fix this.

vanilla glquake attempts to use paletted textures. this will fail.
this results in lightmap-only walls.
you can work around this by using the -no8bit argument.

64bit versions of windows are unable to run 16bit programs. you can often use dosbox to run 16bit dos programs, but this will not work with win16 apps, and will be suboptimal with 32bit dos programs. 32bit versions will have no issues here, but this is the ONLY reason you'd ever use a 32bit version of windows nowadays.
this is the biggest unfixable issue with recent versions of windows. you can work around it by using a virtual machine (eg: dosbox, or a more complete one like qemu, virtualbox, or equivelent)

different versions have different expectations with mouse acceleration settings. vanilla quake forces an option that will result in mouse acceleration in vista but not xp or earlier. I would like to think that any serious quake port would have this fixed.
such ports MAY be fixed by adding -dinput to their commandline.

there have been some bugs in some engine ports that free bss memory. this can be fatal in vista+ and not be noticed in xp. The only work around is to fix the engine. Note that this is certain engine ports only, and does not affect vanilla.