Cursor can't keep up in Word

[laserblazer]

One of our office staff is complaining that there's a lag between hitting the keys and the text appearing in Word. It never seems to happen whilst I'm there. SIMS is the only other application that is open and I've checked CPU usage whilst she is typing.

 

I'll try cleaning up the machine when she gives me a chance to get on it but I'd welcome any suggestions.

[AngryTechnician]

Are the machines older, single core machines? Our office staff complained of something similar until I replaced their machines last summer, I put it down to something else on the machine causing an intermittent CPU spike (as you've already suspected, it seems). Of course, with a dual core (or hyper-threaded) machine, one rogue process can't hit 100%.

[laserblazer]

No, they are fairly fast HP dual core, lots of RAM. I think I'll disable the AV and see what happens.

[SYNACK]

Are they running XP? I have had this weird cursor slowdown on some XP machines in stuff like the run box and command window. Usually newer machines, I think it may be a bit of a mess up with regard to interupt handling/not 100% drivers as upgrading to Vista completely cured it, 7 too. Tried everything including reimages, bios updates and the latest drivers from their site. These were an Acer and a Lenovo in my case.

[laserblazer]

Blooming typical! We have teachers trying to run their IWBs using Celeron based systems that are 8 years old and there's no money to replace them. I got an email from the Bursar to buy a faster computer because the office staff couldn't work with this Word problem. To be honest, nobody had mentioned it again and I'd forgotten about it. I said the problem wasn't computer power and if the office would let me have some time on the thing, I'd sort it. Anyway, I came in early, reinstated Office and Word seemed fine to me. I then asked the Bursar if I could use the £600 I'd saved her to buy some refurbished HP DC7700s for the classrooms. Guess what she said?

[featured_spectre]

No as it was assigned for office staff?

[laserblazer]

No it's because there's no money in the curriculum budget! God forbid we should spend money on educating the kids! I was given £300 to replace two Win2000 machines in the staff workroom with refurbished DC7700s.

[featured_spectre]

I would have hit the roof personally!!

[glennda]

I would have hit the roof personally!!

 

so would i!

 

I'm quite fortunate that we have no machines which are more then 4 years old with the oldest being core 2 duo but due to budget cuts we are putting off replacing them this year but we have made slt now that we will need to replace around 280 next year.

[laserblazer]

We aren't going to have any redundancies this year though. Even though we have falling pupil numbers.

[glennda]

We aren't going to have any redundancies this year though. Even though we have falling pupil numbers.

 

lucky for you - we are having 5 departmental admin staff, a dt techncian and one of the techs below me has already gone... and pupil numbers are going up!

[Dos_Box]

Do they have wireless KB/mouse? And if so, is there more than one set in the office? I've experienced many random 'occurences' (often never present when I've turned up to look at them) from wireless input devices clashing with each other. Edited April 2, 2011 by Dos_Box

[laserblazer]

No they are all wired but good thinking. Reinstalling Office seems to have fixed it.

[ArchersIT]

I know you seem to have fixed it, but when we had this problem, it was only in one template. This was the school headed notepaper that one of the office staff had created. When I investigated further, all the images (and there were about 7 or 8 of them) were full size and then displayed at 10% (or similar) Once these were shrunk down before inserting the lag disappeared, so I always assumed that the lag was due to word redrawing these images.

 

HTH

 

Jonathan