[Techtalk] Slowly-scrolling scrollbars.

[aesop at fables.co.za]

bottom-posted

Your 29 October 2007 email from Rudy Zijlstra  said thus::

> aesop at fables.co.za wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have searched the Abiword archives and my almost 2 year back archives of techtalk, so no 
> > guides there.
> >
> > I recently installed Slackware 10 on a P200MMX with 128Mb
> > I have used both Gnome and FVWM window managers but the result is the same.
> >
> > When I click on the scoll bar and use this to go down through my document the scrolling is 
> > extremely slow, painfully unuseably so.
> > If I use the down arrow to move the cursor down, then once it gets to the bottom of the page it 
> > too slows to a halt. The text can hardly crawl up from the bottom!
> > The PgUp/Dn buttons are slow.
> >
> > Gnumeric is faster, but not fast. All sorts of other things like screen savers seem to go at a 
> > reasonable speed. I see that I am using less than half of the memory even when running the 
> > system monitor
> >
> > Do you think I have a video card problem? It actually has an onboard S3 chip and I set this at 
> > about 4096 in the Xconfig file up from a lower value and no change.
> >
> > Any suggestions welcome. What gives?
> >
> > Thanks
> > Anne
> >
> >   
> Hi Anne,
> 
> can you check cpu usage while you are doing this?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rudy
Thank you for the response, Rudy, Wim, and Minusia.

That's quite a range of possibilities that you offer.

Rudi, I looked at the cpu on the system monitor after I had scrolled up and down continuosly for 
a while. As you may have suspected it had flatlined at 100%

I edited out the 1024 x 762 resolution in the xconfig file leaving the maximum as 800 x 600 , and 
set the default colour depth down to 16. (I'm running on a 17" monitor but when I hand the 
computer over to a needy friend they'll only have a 15" job so that is fine).

Now the problem is solved, a bit of bleeding from the bottom edge as you scroll the page up, but 
substantially it is useable now. 

Wim, I am pretty sure the S3 driver is OK, I got the onboard chipset reference which comes up 
at the start of boot and this is listed in the database for the S3 driver so we had a troublefree x 
configuration run.

Minusia, that is an intriguing suggestion. If I said that I had a CD drive that needs a knock 
everytime to persuade it to open would you also say that? Still, I have a host of old drives cokied 
on the top to say that they won't open or won't shut! If I can source an old P1 power supply I'll 
give it a go anyway. I haven't got much hooked up to it and the monitor is plugged in to a 
separate wall plug.

Thank you all

bestest
Anne

----
Anne Wainwright