Hi all,

I am having a very irking issue. To be honest, it actually irks me so much I just stop studying some times. Here's what happens:

When practicing with my bamboo tablet, the stroke will write smoothly as I write with the pen. But all of a sudden, for no specific reason (or when I do something on another program), the strokes become hard to write (need to press harder on pen or longer) and the strokes become larger. It seems the flash container becomes slow ?

Does anyone else have this? Firefox 4 won't let me study smoothly.
Chrome will let me study very smoothly until I click on something out of chrome (e.g., "pause" on windows media player).
Same with IE, each stroke isn't instant and hence I cannot write characters fast.

My computer's performance is very much sufficient so I really don't think it has anything to do with that.

this is why I've just used a mouse till now. It always works without a problem

I'm no computer expert, but from my experience Windows prioritizes the active program and de-prioritizes inactives. This can usually be seen when you load several tabs in firefox, switch to a different program, and several minutes later switch back to firefox: though all of your tabs are loaded in memory, it takes a few moments before it becomes visible and responsive.

Anyway, here's a possible cure: when you're running FF, press CTRL+Esc. This will bring up the task manager. Under the Process tab, find Firefox. Right-click it and set the Priority to Realtime.

I have no idea if that will work since I have no fancy bamboo tablet (I wish!), but it certainly can't hurt.

First, check to see if you see the same issue when using a mouse, to figure out whether it's a Wacom issue or a Flash/browser/CPU issue.

If it's a Wacom issue, make sure you have the settings solid as per the settings page:
http://www.skritter.com/wacoms/settings

Otherwise, try closing other programs (and especially other browser tabs like Gmail or anything that uses heavy Flash or JavaScript) and see if that reduces the severity of the issue.

You can look at your task manager or Chrome's task manager to see how much CPU Flash is using and look for patterns in what it uses before and after the slowdown starts. If you see anything interesting there, we can figure it out further.

When did this start happening, by the way?

nick, you guys will never cease to impress me !! After going through the settings, it seems to be working better.

Indeed, I do know how to tweak with windows and all the processes. I tried setting it to real time as well as the plugin-container and pen-tablet processes. But that gave no results.

I'll keep this thread updated if things stay well or go bad. I'm probably not the only one! now back to cramming for me =D thank you!!