Good question. I think latency is the most important ingredient in an
enjoyable computer. When you press a key or click on an icon you want
something to happen right away. Without that immediate feedback you can't
even be sure that the computer registered your action.
The kind of latency you describe is typically caused by your operating
system being preoccupied with something other than what you are doing. On
a PC there are many things that can cause this to happen. Finding the
cause can take a lot of effort. The easy solution that many PC users take
is formatting their hard drive and reinstalling Windows and all the
software. This is wasy to do if you don't have lots of software installed
and you have all your software discs.
Otherwise you have to look at each possible cause and clean up your
computer until the problem goes away. First things to try is to look for
viruses; run a scandisk to look for disk problems, run msconfig to find
and disable useless stuff launched at startup, and run a registery
cleaner. You should also check your browser to see if you have too many
add ons. Installing too many fonts can do this too or even one corrupt
font can do it. These have all fixed latency problems for me over the
years.
>"... "snappy" is typically a latency issue ..."
>I notice my 1 yr old Dell Precision workstation
>with a Dual Core and 3GB RAM has particularly lost its "snappiness".
>Programs launch a tad slow considering... there is sometime a text lag
>when typing into a Google
>search box, etc..
>Your remark about latency drew my attention...
>Was wondering were I might look...
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