TOOSLOW.DOC: Two Easy Ways to Speed Up Your HP48 Keyboard, by Joe Horn

Many people have complained over the years that some HP48's seem to
respond faster than others to keystrokes.

Although a valid complaint, please be aware that you can easily
control the worst keyboard bottlenecks yourself:

(1) USER mode slows down EVERY KEYSTROKE depending on the number and
    type of key assignments you currently have.  If you have lots of
    assignments (as many of us do), especially if the assignments are
    long composite objects, then TURN OFF USER MODE and you'll be
    amazed how peppy the keyboard becomes.

(2) The LIBRARY menu (menu 24 on the S/SX; menu 112 on the G/GX) slows
    down EVERY STACK DISPLAY UPDATE depending on how many libraries
    you currently have attached.  If you have lots of libraries (as
    many of us do), DON'T STAY IN THE MAIN LIBRARY MENU; either go
    into a particular library's menu, or into any other menu (like
    MTH), and you'll immediately notice how much faster
    keyboard-to-stack operations become.

Worst-case scenario: with lots of key assignments and libraries in
memory, turn on USER mode and press LIBRARY.  Then try to do some
simple arithmetic on several multi-digit numbers.  It's downright
painful.  But just press USR and MTH, and everything's back to full
speed.

-Joseph K. Horn-   -Peripheral Vision, Ltd.-
akcs.joehorn@hpcvbbs.cv.hp.com

Last-minute addition: I just noticed that the VAR menu can slow down
operations, too, if it has lots of pages and you're on one of the
pages near the end.  For example, I have a directory with 318 objects
in it, and when I'm on its last menu page, the machine really bogs
down.  Press NXT to go to the first page, and things get lively again.