I’ve had the annoying slow typing syndrome with my Vista Home Premium (SP1) based laptop. At first it seemed that I had perhaps too much software installed. But my computer has a lot of horsepower so it didn’t make sense that it was lagging. So I set out to find the origin of the problem.
The problem was not particular to any program. Lag occurred when trying to move the cursor, scroll up and down a page in Explorer, Firefox, all Office Ultimate 2007 programs. First, I eliminated some variables and all but a few very essential startup items, and all non-Microsoft services, and restarted. Problem was gone. To test out my method I opened a browser window, and in the homepage I typed furiously and randomly as fast as I possibly could, for about 30 seconds. There was no lag at all. Aha!
After utilizing a systematic search and discovery method, I was able to isolate the startup culprit and the problem stopped. That however was not conclusive, but it was a start. So I enabled it and disabled it in succession with its corresponding reboots, and invariably the problem returned or disappeared. Next I enabled every startup item but that one. Still no typing lag! Then I enabled all the services that I had disabled. Restarted and¦ no typing lag!
It seems I succeeded in isolating the problematic startup item. Ok so what does that program do? It was media related, and the first thing I noticed was that my DVDs were now not playing automatically when loaded into the CD/DVD drive, even though autoplay was set to automatically play DVDs with the correct program. Ok, with a special little registry tweak, I was able to change that and voila! autoplay works with DVDs again!
This should not to be construed as a universal solution for typing delays in Vista, since different computers will be slowed down by different situations. But it does illustrate that there are simple handlings to isolate your problems and get you up and running at the speed you are used to operating. Feel free to contact me for more details.
Happy fast typing!