Typing Speed Slows Down Considerably

[Tanneron]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Power PC

I've written here before about how my cursor can't keep up with my typing. Here's what I discovered today. For some reason when my Toolbox drop-down menu is open on the side of the screen while I'm typing in my document, my cursor can often be an entire sentence behind. But when I close the Toolbox window from the screen my cursor resumes its normal operation. This is very strange. Has anyone encountered the same problem?

 

[John McGhie]

There have been two other reports of slow typing. Neither mentioned the
Toolbox, but that used to cause problems in Word 2004.

I can't make it happen here: what do you have DISPLAYED in the toolbox, and
what is in the document?

Cheers

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Power PC

I've written here before about how my cursor can't keep up with my typing.
Here's what I discovered today. For some reason when my Toolbox drop-down menu
is open on the side of the screen while I'm typing in my document, my cursor
can often be an entire sentence behind. But when I close the Toolbox window
from the screen my cursor resumes its normal operation. This is very strange.
Has anyone encountered the same problem?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Juergen Fenn]

There have been two other reports of slow typing. Neither mentioned the
Toolbox, but that used to cause problems in Word 2004.

Well, I don't think either that this has to do with the toolbox, but I
realised problems with my speed of typing, too. When I wrote a small
paper of only four pages of continuous text I switched off the spell
checker and all automatic formatting. However, typing speed slowed down
continuously. The rolling ball os Mac OS X showed up again and again.
Something seemed to be working in the backgound still slowing down Word.
But CPU activity for Word only showed <5%.

MacBook, 2,16 GHz, 1 MB RAM, Tiger 10.4.11.

Jürgen.

 

[Ruchir]

i am having the same problem in word.

also, excel slows down considerably. a simple copy paste takes quite
some time.

any ideas why?

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Jurgen:

What else is running? I would say you may be out of memory if you have only
1GM of RAM.

It's possible that the system is waiting to write pages of memory back and
forth to disk. Have a look in Activity Monitor and see if Free Memory is
low and Page ins/outs are climbing rapidly.

Cheers

Well, I don't think either that this has to do with the toolbox, but I
realised problems with my speed of typing, too. When I wrote a small
paper of only four pages of continuous text I switched off the spell
checker and all automatic formatting. However, typing speed slowed down
continuously. The rolling ball os Mac OS X showed up again and again.
Something seemed to be working in the backgound still slowing down Word.
But CPU activity for Word only showed <5%.

MacBook, 2,16 GHz, 1 MB RAM, Tiger 10.4.11.

Jürgen.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie]

You have not specified your version information, so it is not possible to
answer your question.

i am having the same problem in word.

also, excel slows down considerably. a simple copy paste takes quite
some time.

any ideas why?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Juergen Fenn]

What else is running? I would say you may be out of memory if you have only
1GM of RAM.

It's possible that the system is waiting to write pages of memory back and
forth to disk. Have a look in Activity Monitor and see if Free Memory is
low and Page ins/outs are climbing rapidly.

Everything is all right in Activity Monitor. Word claims <10% of CPU
activity, everything that slows down Word is already switched off, and
there is way enough of free memory available. I looked at this already.

Also, 1 GB of RAM must be enough for writing just four pages of text. I
wrote my doctoral thesis in Emacs using LaTeX, it was >200 pages long,
without any problems.

Regards,
Juergen.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Jurgen:

One gig is nowhere near enough to get the best out of Microsoft Office 2008
on OS 10.4 or 10.5.

That said, 1GB should not slow down noticeably if Word is the only thing
running.

Word does not have a linear relationship to memory usage: the size of the
text part of the file has very little to do with Word's memory demands.

Word loads the text portion into a memory buffer, up to the capacity of the
buffer (64 KB). So the size of the text has little effect on Word. But
disk issues will slow it down badly.

If you want to look for this problem, we may be able to find and fix it.
But there's no point looking at CPU activity, since Word is not particularly
CPU-intensive.

I am guessing this will be waits for disk writes or reads, or waits for some
other application such as a haxie or an enabler.

Cheers

Everything is all right in Activity Monitor. Word claims <10% of CPU
activity, everything that slows down Word is already switched off, and
there is way enough of free memory available. I looked at this already.

Also, 1 GB of RAM must be enough for writing just four pages of text. I
wrote my doctoral thesis in Emacs using LaTeX, it was >200 pages long,
without any problems.

Regards,
Juergen.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Susan]

Hi- Were you ever able to resolve this? I do not have a Mac, but I'm having
the same problem with my new Vista....Help!!

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Susan:

Yes, for Vista we have the answers. It has nothing to do with this problem,
which occurs ONLY in Mac Word 2008, which is not the same thing.

In Vista, this problem is usually caused by too much pre-loaded
"Rubbish-Ware" slowing the system down.

Go to the PC shop around the corner and pay them 30 bucks to re-load Windows
for you. Take your Windows Vista DVD and product key with you, and tell
them you want a "Clean load with no crap-ware".

It will take them about an hour, and your system will run nearly ten times
quicker, for the rest of its life Ask them to show you how while they
work, so you can do this yourself in future.

For heaven's sake, DON'T take it to a LARGE computer shop. They will send
it away to an outsourcer. You will be without the computer for three weeks,
they will repeat the original installation, charge you $150 and send it back
just as bad (probably worse, because they'll stuff something up along the
way...)

In future: make sure you are in a PC Word group: this group is dedicated to
Word on the Macintosh. Not your fault, the PC web interface is
appallingly-badly designed. Next time, stand over it and make sure it
directs your question into the appropriate group for the PC software you are
asking about.

Cheers

Hi- Were you ever able to resolve this? I do not have a Mac, but I'm having
the same problem with my new Vista....Help!!

--

Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Clive Huggan]

Hello Susan,

This is where you'll find a list of all the PC forums that Microsoft has:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/FlyoutOverview.mspx

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
====================

 

[Juergen Fenn]

This is where you'll find a list of all the PC forums that Microsoft has:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/FlyoutOverview.mspx

These forums are originally kept on <and
should best be accessed using a newsreader...

Jürgen.

 

[Clive Huggan]

Exactly, Jürgen: all the regulars here use newsreaders or Entourage.

Cheers,

Clive
======

 

[Phillip Jones]

I'm a regular and I use either SeaMonkey (Mozilla all in one) or
Thunderbird.

And second I was told years ago that the proper sever to get the fastest
response is:

news://msnews.microsoft.com

not

news://news.microsoft.com

msnews is originating sever while all other are mirrors. That's what I
was told by one of the MVP may have been JE, but, it was so long I' am
not sure.

Exactly, Jürgen: all the regulars here use newsreaders or Entourage.

Cheers,

Clive
======

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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mailto[email protected]

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<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/Harris/default.htm>
<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/Jones/default.htm>

<http://www.vpea.org>

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Phillip:

I think that information is a few years out of date.

They are both resolving to the same IP address these days, but the domain
name returned is msnews.microsoft.com for both.

There was a time when we used to play around with this, a few years back,
because they were "mirrors". These days, they are welded into a
"load-balancing cluster" that presents to the network as a single server.

I believe there are something like 32 servers involved, across more than one
location. There is indeed a "Cluster Controller" that keeps them all
up-to-date, but as far as I know, it's invisible to people outside the
Microsoft corporate network and will not respond at all.

Every now and then, the cluster controller gets overloaded and falls over,
and then you can get some really strange differences between the servers for
a few hours while they rebuild the indexes.

But for best service these days, I agree with you: go into
msnews.microsoft.com and you will get whichever server is least busy at the
time

Cheers

I'm a regular and I use either SeaMonkey (Mozilla all in one) or
Thunderbird.

And second I was told years ago that the proper sever to get the fastest
response is:

news://msnews.microsoft.com

not

news://news.microsoft.com

msnews is originating sever while all other are mirrors. That's what I
was told by one of the MVP may have been JE, but, it was so long I' am
not sure.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Phillip Jones]

Glad technology caught up. But; also glad that my information is not
completely out of date.

I'll stick with the MSNEWS then if this is the parent then I ought to
get the fastest response

Hi Phillip:

I think that information is a few years out of date.

They are both resolving to the same IP address these days, but the domain
name returned is msnews.microsoft.com for both.

There was a time when we used to play around with this, a few years back,
because they were "mirrors". These days, they are welded into a
"load-balancing cluster" that presents to the network as a single server.

I believe there are something like 32 servers involved, across more than one
location. There is indeed a "Cluster Controller" that keeps them all
up-to-date, but as far as I know, it's invisible to people outside the
Microsoft corporate network and will not respond at all.

Every now and then, the cluster controller gets overloaded and falls over,
and then you can get some really strange differences between the servers for
a few hours while they rebuild the indexes.

But for best service these days, I agree with you: go into
msnews.microsoft.com and you will get whichever server is least busy atthe
time

Cheers

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Phillip M. Jones, CET |LIFE MEMBER: VPEA ETA-I, NESDA, ISCET, Sterling
616 Liberty Street |Who's Who. PHONE:276-632-5045, FAX:276-632-0868
Martinsville Va 24112 |[email protected], ICQ11269732, AIM pjonescet
------------------------------------------------------------------------

If it's "fixed", don't "break it"!

mailto[email protected]

<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/default.htm>
<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/90th_Birthday/index.htm>
<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/Fulcher/default.html>
<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/Harris/default.htm>
<http://www.kimbanet.com/~pjones/Jones/default.htm>

<http://www.vpea.org>

 

[Jennifer Saunders]

Yes, yes, yes! I just bought Microsoft Office 2008 for my mac and I have encountered the same problem. It is so annoying! Is there any way to correct this or speed up the cursor? HELP!

 

[Jennifer Saunders]

Yes, yes, yes! I just bought Microsoft Office 2008 for my mac and I have encountered the same problem. It is so annoying! Is there any way to correct this or speed up the cursor? HELP!

 

[John McGhie]

There is nothing YOU can do, but there is something Microsoft needs to do.

There's a fix coming out in Service Release 12.1.0.

The fix is currently in testing. We'll get it as soon as it passes.

Cheers

Yes, yes, yes! I just bought Microsoft Office 2008 for my mac and I have
encountered the same problem. It is so annoying! Is there any way to correct
this or speed up the cursor? HELP!

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Juergen Fenn]

There is nothing YOU can do, but there is something Microsoft needs to do.
There's a fix coming out in Service Release 12.1.0.
The fix is currently in testing. We'll get it as soon as it passes.

This needs further testing with me, but at least I seems to me that the
problem with typing speed slowing down even more the longer you type has
been solved...

Thanks,
Jürgen.