Typing slows down

[Mala]

Weird problem here - and I have a friend who says the same thing's happening to her.

Typing slows down at random - I keep typing (I'm a fast touch-typist) and after a pause the line fills in after me.

What I mean is this: I type "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", and after "Su" nothing appears, though I keep typing - then "percalifragilisticexpialidocious" suddenly unfolds itself.

I'm using a G4 PowerBook with 1GB of memory, surely enough for a little typing! - my friend's on a G5, both using Panther.

What causes this irritating glitch, and is there a solution?

 

[abhishekit]

yah sometimes it happens to me also...i have a g4 ibook...although very rarely...but i still never type Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious...
actually it just happens on safari...and anyways safari takes too much of my cpu..so i just attribute it to that...

 

[cb911]

i've also noticed this happening in Safari, mostly after i've got an uptime of about a few days or more. usually happens when i'm typing a URL, or typing in Safari, like forums etc.

have you ever seen it happen in any other apps?

in my case i think it's mostly due to the fact that i've got heaps of stuff open and havn't re-booted in a while.

i've also been having this happen to me since about 10.1... as long as i can remember.

 

[GovornorPhatt]

On my G5 I've had a similar problem with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Both MX and MX 2004 randomly slow down when typing. Then I see it in slow motion, letter by letter. I have 1 gigabyte of RAM. I've always put up with it and restarting Dreamweaver always seemed to fix it. But I never thought that it could be a OS X releated issue.

 

[rainman::|:|]

this is a major bug in X that i hope to see fixed soon. Sometimes typing will cause the disk to spin up, for no reason (like, when i use the Google box in safari, it will type three characters and then stick), and the text will pause until the disk is spun-up. i'll promise you that if you disable "spin down hard drives", it'll stop doing it. that's not much of an option tho. i get annoyed by it at least 3 times a day, so you're not alone.

paul

 

[Mala]

It happens most commonly in Eudora for me.

I do often have many programs open; one of the jobs I do requires research produced in a bunch of different ways, so I often run Eudora, Word, Acrobat, Quark, Distiller, Photoshop and Safari at the same time, by necessity.

Another thing I find, by the way, is that if I use the PowerBook to play CDs it heats up something chronic. So I don't play CDs on it at all. Seems a waste.

 

[Mala]

Happens in Word too, I've just realised; I usually don't watch what i type, but once you start, that's it, you're hypnotised.

 

[abhishekit]

it may sound too basic, but did you check the settings of the key repeat rate and delay rate under keyboards and mouse in system prefs...
cheers

 

[skytown205]

I switched over to Mac a couple of years ago, back in the nascent days of 10.1, and I noticed the slow typing immediately--I was anticipating working in MS Word a lot, and I remember typing out some lines in the store and being a little dismayed--almost everything else about it I loved. At the time, I remember, I lamented the lack of some kind of scroll apparatus on the laptops, as well--which seemed to me almost necessary for working with word-processing documents a lot.

Thankfully, I made the switch anyway. It sounds perhaps a little silly now, but those were legitimate concerns at the time. And I still wish I could scroll on the laptop more easily, with, say, the kind of embedded wheel that they have in VAIOs. And more or less I have gotten used to the typing speed in Word. Safari, on the other hand, is abysmal in this regard. I think that the OS has made great improvements in speed since 10.1, but this is still one of those things that needs to be fixed. Even if everything else in the OS is zooming, a slow typing speed (like slow scrolling) gives the appearance of a slow OS.

 

[virividox]

happens to me as well but i rarely notice now.