Why is my Mac too slow to keep up with my typing?

I have a 300 mhz Mac G3 that I like to work on. Problem is, it has a recurrent problem with keeping up iwth my typing. I type 60-70 wpm when I’m in the groove, so it SHOULDN’T have this problem.

It has the problem when I’m typing in a Mozilla browser window AND when I type in Microsoft Word, so I know it’s not the app. It’s got 320 megs of RAM and plenty of open space on the hard drive, so I know that’s not the problem.

I can’t figure out what the problem is, because the Mac is so damn slow.

On Mozilla, I have to wait for the Mac to get lost, becuase if I don’t some of the characters I type in will get “lost” and my words will come out even more gibberish-y than usual. If I wait for the Mac to catch up, the cursor advances S-L-O-W-L-Y catching up one character at a time.

In Word, I can type in a phrase, but the cursor doesn’t follow it. If I wait a few seconds, the cursor suddenly appears with the whole phrase behind it - not one character at a time. Word doesn’t seem so prone to “lose” characters.

What the hell is going on here, the computer shouldn’t be that fucking slow – 300 mhz is 300 million operations per second – even with plenty of maintenance going on, that should leave room for my puny 5 or 6 characters per second.

I blame the software. But why does the problem occur with two distinctly different pieces of software then? System? I’ve tried general controls, there’s a control for cursor blinking but not for text entry.

And yes, I’ve tried running the system with just Mozilla up and just Word up – same problem. Though it DOES seem to be not so bad when I first pull Mozilla/Word up.

This is fucking weird … I used to have a 2.4 mhz Radio Shack Model 100 laptop. It kept up better than my Mac does.

BTW, this thing’ll run Photoshop 5.5 doing large graphics with multiple levels, no problem. It’s NOT that it can;t handle data.

I remember having the problem with Macs like 10 years ago (I type about as fast as you do.) Back then the mantra was, “if you want to type, get a PC! Macs are for graphics.” I’m surprised to hear they’re still like this.

Mozilla does the same think on this POS Dell box I am forced to use here at work. :mad:

You should supply more info: what model Mac you’re using, what OS version, what software versions, etc. A few quick thoughts:

  • A 300Mhz G3 is too slow to run most modern day Mac apps, and OS X is no longer officially supported on early G3s. Word could easily be giving your computer trouble, fat piece of bloatware that it is.

  • If you’re noticing a slowdown after running the apps for a while, it might be your virtual memory paging out to your hard drive. Despite what Apple tells you, OS X really needs a good half a gig of RAM to be comfortably useable. If you’re using OS 9, try shutting off virtual memory and increasing Word’s memory allocation. If you’re using an older Mac with a slower HD, that could definitely be slowing you down.

  • You might have a peripheral like a USB hub taking up I/O bandwidth, or a background process sucking up processor cycles.

These are just guesses based on the info you provided. I’d try writing in the text editor (TextEdit on OS X, SimpleText on OS 9) and seeing if that’s any better.

Let me just add that I myself use a 350Mhz G4 w/ 512 MB of RAM at home, and while Word does occasionally lag, I have no trouble typing in other apps, and I type about as fast as you do. (This is running OS X 10.3.)

STILL like this? Nu-uh. He’s using a computer that is at least 4-5 years old. I’m not sure what the problem is (i’ve been using macs since the early 90’s and never ran into a problem like this), but i wouldn’t blame it on the current running of the Mac line. We’re talking up to a dual 2.5 GHz G5, baby! smokin’

I think Nonsuch is making some good suggestions. Good luck!

I’m running on OS 9.2. And my version of Word is 5.1.I will agree with you that all versions of word from 6.0 are bloatware. But 5.1 is small, fast and sweet.

I’ll try it, but if that is so then why are Mozilla and others also affected?

Maybe, but then why doesn’t it slow down the much more memory-intensive Photoshop?

Good idea. I tried it. Same result. I also tried a different bvrowser – IE for the Mac. Same result – this post was done via IE. S l o w l y.

Hey, it’s not like you have to put coal in the hopper to get it to work!
:stuck_out_tongue:

Have you turned off system wide text smoothing in the “Appearance” Control Panel? Some applications take a performance hit from that. Also, it’s been a while, but I seem to recall that there was some damned network setting in one of the many network related Control Panels that caused keyboard oddities. It was a big deal on Apple’s tech support site at the time, but I don’t remember the details.

I vote for a glitch.

I use a WallStreet, a '98-vintage PowerBook that’s not even supposed to support MacOSX 10.3.x. I’m currently booted in 10.3.6, have 512 MB RAM, have a Sonnet G4/500 daughtercard upgrade, and most of my apps are on an external FireWife drive that I can only access courtesy of a CardBus card since this Mac is too old to have FireWire.

If your Mac can’t keep apace of your typing, something’s fishy.

Of course you’re using Word. which is a piece of shit. Word sucks. Always did. Hate it. Compose your screeds in something responsive and useful and paste them into Word if you need something Word does.

Word is a piece of shit, indeed!

I use OS 9 on a G3 and do lots of writing on WriteNow, a “good enough” program last updated in 1994. (Here’s a download page.)

Does your computer need a desktop rebuild/ disk optimization session?

Evil Captor: Is it just as slow if you boot with extensions off? (Hold down Shift key after hitting power button.)

Several notes:

  1. Internet Explorer on the Mac blows major chunks.

  2. The last good version of Word for the Mac was version 5.1a

  3. I was going to suggest that 320 megs of RAM is a tad on the slow side, but then the OP mentioned he’s using MacOS 9.2, so that should be okay.

  4. Definitely try booting with extensions turned off and see what kind of performance you get. My guess is that it will run very fast, which means something is stealing CPU cycles from you.

  5. Update to MacOS X. :slight_smile:

More data: I did a restart, and then tried SimpleText, Word and IE in succession. All three worked fine immediately after restart, but after the computer had been sitting around for an hour, I was back in molasses mode.

I will try the extensions off trick and see what happens. I just can’t figure out why my computer is going into molasses mode on the keyboard input, but can manipulate graphics in Photoshop (much more data intensive) with no problem. Well, maybe there’s a good reason for all that memory-hogging that Photoshop does.

Woah, there’s definitely a problem. Isn’t Word 5.1 the version I used on my Macintosh SE back in 1991? That was System 6, one meg of memory and a 20 meg drive, and it ran perfectly.

Are you using a font manager? How many fonts do you have open at a time? Sometimes all those fonts open at once can really bog down performance. Shoot… if i have too many fonts open, QuarkXPress will just crash upon launch, no matter if i have a gig of RAM, or a smokin’ processor.