The Pause that ... Infuriates!

I have a problem with my work laptop, one that my buddies in IT have been trying to help me with to no avail.

When I connect my laptop at work through its docking station, I have intermittent but painfully obvious pausing issues. It gets so bad that entire words get skipped while I’m typing. It’s so bad that, if I’m listening to music, the pauses during the songs are annoying and obvious. It’s so bad that the mouse jumps across the entire screen or, worse, just sits in the same location because the machine can’t figure out where it should be.

If I unhook everything from the docking station and plug it directly into the back of the laptop, the pausing issue is minimized, but doesn’t go away entirely. The issues while typing become only hiccups. The mouse will catch up to where it should be. But the music glitches are still fairly pronounced.

However, when I work from home and connect via the internet, I do not experience the pausing issue at all, even though the connection is quite a bit slower and there are more things prone to cause issues.

One thing I just recently noticed is that, when I am playing music and it pauses, the sound becomes scratchy and rough after it recovers from the hiccup. I didn’t notice this at first when the pausing issue began, so I’m wondering if this is new symptom or whatever is causing the pausing is somehow getting worse.

So, the obvious thing is the docking station, right? No dice. IT has switched out my docking station and it still occurs. So it must be my chassis or laptop, right? No dice. IT has changed my chassis and it continues to occur. A driver? We have updated everything to the most recent/best we can find, to no avail. I have two spyware systems protecting my machine and a good, corporate antivirus program running on it—it is not a virus or spyware causing the issue. We have also done a Repair of the Windows OS to see if other drivers might have been the problem—again, no dice. Still having the problem. Since it is most obvious while typing, we thought maybe it was the keyboard, so we replaced it. Still pausing.

I am extremely frustrated with this problem. I type all day long, so to have something that so greatly distracts and interferes with my ability to type makes me less productive. My buddy in IT is frustrated, as the problem is intermittent enough that he can’t track it down or find a FAQ or knowledgebase article about it.

One suggestion I got from a reliable source is that “it is a Dell.” I’m not sure I accept that as a reason that the machine pauses. Especially not when it was working fine for the first many moons that I had it and this issue only started at the end of February. Nice try, though. ;-)

It wouldn’t be so bad if the applications “caught up.” But, when the pause happens, it doesn’t capture the keystrokes I’m typing at all. For example, let’s say I’m typing the phrase “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cow.” If the pausing issue occurs twice during that typing, the sentence may wind up looking like, “The qck brown fox jer the lazy cow.” It totally misses and skips the letters typed during the pause. Sometimes the pause is long enough or I’m typing fast enough that it includes entire words, but most of the time it is just a few letters worth. But, again, I type all day long—it is imperative that I only make my own mistakes and get them corrected—I don’t need the system helping me to make even more!

Hopefully we can narrow down and resolve this issue soon. I’m close to wanting to throw the damn laptop over my cubicle wall and see what happens!!!!