Keyboard Lag

I just found this forum, and I'm surprised that I don't see any posts about keyboard lag. I got a Vostro 1500 a few weeks ago. I haven't done much with it except install programs, since I bought it for travel, and I haven't gone anywhere yet . I noticed that it had a very annoying keyboard lag. I found a fix for it on Dell's offical support forum, which was to prevent PCMservice.exe from running at startup. That completely fixed it . Hasn't anyone here had the lag problem? Based on the complaints on the other forum, I thought it was a widespread problem.

 

It seems we are alone on this one.... I too had the same annoying problem, if you are reffering to short pauses (not long) when writing. I posted some weeks ago about it. What I did was to removed two services from starting automatically when I boot the computer, one of those was precisly pcmservice.exe. I had no idea until reading your post today that it was, in fact, the one causing the problem (is refered as part of Dell media experience software). The other one I removed was updreg.exe (a process from Creative Tech. that reminds us to register their products).

But yes... no one seems to have that annoying issue... except us...

 

Yes, that is what I'm talking about. And if you pressed the backspace key, there is no telling where it would stop!

I don't understand why everyone doesn't have this problem. After I fixed it by disabling PCMservice from starting up, I emailed Dell to ask about it. I got a responce in much less than perfect english telling me to re-enable PCMservice, modify the Window performance options, do a clean boot, and if that didn't work, do a PC restore. Well, the Windows performance was already set to give foreground priority, I don't know what good a clean boot would do... of course it won't lag with a clean boot, PCMservice would not be running.. that's not going to fix the problem when I do a normal boot. And, I'm not about to start over with a clean HD for this. I don't plan on using MediaDirect anyway, so I'll leave PCMservice startup disabled.

If you are interested, here are a couple of links to this problem on the other forum:

http://www.dellcommunity.com/suppor...eral&message.id=249894&query.id=49464#M249894

http://www.dellcommunity.com/suppor...eral&message.id=253345&query.id=49814#M253345

 

Never had the problem *shrugs*

 

There's was a thread reporting Keyboard lag a while back (not THAT long back--I've only been here for a week or two). Other than that, none that I know of. You guys must actually be in the minority for this problem.

 

You've only been here a week or two and have 122 posts! DUDE!!!

The lag problem seems to be caused by a program related to MediaDirect, do the folks without the problem have Dell MediaDirect on their PCs?

 

Thanks for the links Jeff Leites... I also posted on Dell forums some time ago, but unfortunately on the "First time Users" forum and waited for long hours. Nobody helped. Perhaps was / is due to my english, 'cause I refered the problem as "can't type in real time!! ". I found the solution by preventing programs to load from booting, and the second one I tried was precisly the pcmservice. Lucky me !!!

Regards.

 

Yeah... I've been scouring the net for information about all sorts of laptops since I wanted to get one, but I settled down with a Dell and decided to join this forum and actually engage in some of the conversations .

Besides, my Univ courses doesn't start until next Tuesday and I only work half a day... so I have quite a bit of free time right now .

 

Yes it does seem like an interesting problem,although I've never experienced it. And haven't seen anything about it on the forum. Jeff you stated that when you hit backspace, you don't know when it will stop, is this just from a quick tap and it goes crazy?

 

No, I stated it poorly. I should have said "hold down the backspace key". After I disabled PCMservice, the backspacing stops when I release the key, before I disabled PCMservice, the backspacing would continue after I released the key due the amount of backspacing that had been buffered, but not yet displayed.

BTW, last night I pessed the MediaDirect button when the system was off, and it set up the application. It appears to work. I ran PCMservice.exe to see if the lag was still there with MediaDirect set up, and it was, I had to end the service to get the keyboard working again. I don't see much use for MediaDirect, it doesn't take that much longer to actually boot up.

Do those of you that don't have a problem have MediaDirect and PCMservice?

 

Yes,I do have both.And thanxs for clearing up your post.

 

I've had the keyboard lag for about a month - I got my Vostro 1400 at the beginning of January. A Dell rep deactivated PCMService.exe, and the problem's cleared up. An interesting experiment is, with a text editor open, start up the Task Manager and open the <Performance> tab, so you can watch your CPU Usage History. Now, hold down a letter for a while in the text editor. My CPU Usage pops up to around 15-20% for about 6 seconds (while letters pour into the text editor), then dips to about 2-3% for a second - which is when the lag starts. It's periodic, the lag doesn't begin right when you begin typing, but when you hit those 6 second marks. Now, with PCMService.exe disabled, typing doesn't drive my processor up more than 2%, and there's no lag. Just thought it would be helpful for the input, since it doesn't look like a common problem.

 

I found that dell has published a patch to fix the problem. If you go to this link http://tinyurl.com/5kdk2w then that will take you to the download page for there patch.

 

Identical Problem here - Inspiron 1501.

Rendered unusable by this keyboard lag problem. I went as far as to rebuild it twice - the whole hog, flattening the disk partition, complete from the ground up build every time.

Only on the second time round did I notice that the problems only started to manifest itself after the ATI drivers went on.

The culprit - "The ATI Hoytkey Poller", disabled this from the system startup services and the machine is brought back to life.