Why does my new laptop delete things so slowly?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The strange thing is, this stopped happening for some brief period today. But now it’s happening again.

The thing that’s happening is, if I press my backspace key and hold it down, it repeatedly deletes characters as it should–but much more slowly than I’m used to. About seven characters a second, it appears. (The same goes for holding down letters and letting them repeatedly type as well.)

I figured I’d go find a setting someday if it started to really bother me, but never got around to it.

But today, for no reason I can discern, it stopped deleting slowly. It began deleting at a speed that felt much more normal to me.

Then, a few hours later, it went back to slow mode, again for no reason I can discern.

Any idea what I need to do to change this behavior?

2

BTW Windows 8.1, and this page does not seem to explain what I need it to explain. I can’t find the “keyboard” setting dialogue it says should exist in the control panel somewhere.

ETA: That’d be because I am accidentally looking at a page for Windows XP.

3

Okay, sorry for the triple post.

I found the keyboard settings. I changed NOTHING. And yet it’s fixed. WTF?

4

If it randomly toggles between fast and slow then it doesn’t sound like a setting to me.

I would open the Task Manager and look at what’s eating up CPU time when the slow deleting is in progress, compared to when the fast deleting works. Go to the Processes tab and click on the CPU column to sort by that attribute.

5

It seems confirmed. Tonight it has reverted to slow two more times–and both times it reverted back to fast when I simply opened the keyboard settings dialogue.

I’ll keep testing this out, but if it really is true that it’s randomly un-setting the speed setting then re-setting it just when I open the keyboard settings, any idea what could be going on and how I could stop it?

6

1, Run a virus scan with Malwarebytes. Normally, the built in virus protection is fine but it’s good to double check from time to time.

  1. Is this happening in your browser, or everywhere? It it’s your browser, you might try clearing your cache and tinkering with your extensions etc. You might even try creating a new profile and seeing if that fixes it, for the purpose of narrowing it down.

  2. Did you install the Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center? It should be part of the regular Windows update process. If you did, try uninstalling it and then re-updating it. (Rightclick on the Start button -> choose Program & Features to uninstall. Then run Windows update.)