I've had my Wacom tablet for less than two months, and for the past couple of weeks, more and more strokes are not being recognized by Skritter. Could this be the pen failing?

I'm using the pen that came with it, so that might have something to do with it, but even so I had expected it to last longer than 28 hours of use...

It's getting so bad that I'm thinking about using pencil and paper for a while, because right now that might actually be faster, or at least less frustrating =(

I've been using the same Wacom pens for years with little or no wear. The only thing I've seen wear out is the tablet surface itself.

Ok, thanks for the info. I guess it's either the tablet itself, or lag.

I've also been using the same Wacom pen for over a year and don't see needing to replace it in the foreseeable future.

It could be a driver or other setting. I've also noticed it can lag the Wacom response if the computer is bogged down with other processes.

I've had mine for years and I have had no problems. The wacom drivers do a lot of reads per second to detect the position of your stylus. If you have anouther app or apps doing a lot of reads it may be causing interference. I would press (control alt delete) to open the Task Manager. Then go into options and have the task manager show you what programs are doing a lot of reads. Last close any non-critical programs doing a lot of reads.

valymer, also make sure that your Wacom settings are set using our guide, if you haven't already:

http://www.skritter.com/wacoms/settings

Thanks everyone for your responses. I closed some background programs and it seemed to improve somewhat. It does seem to be some sort of resource deficiency related to the Wacom drivers - I didn't realize that what they did was such a resource hog! (it might be their programming)

@nick - I've had the settings arranged as per the guide since day one - you should've seen the lackluster performance before I did so! o_O That guide really helped. But lately, it almost seems as if the sensitivity is not as great as it used to be. Like, the difference in pressure between drawing the fattest line and drawing nothing is so incredibly small, that mostly now I have to end up drawing the fat strokes to avoid drawing air. That's actually not a huge problem, although it does all but preclude the use of the smaller drawing area option. I am curious as to whether the resource issue was somehow affecting the Wacom driver to cause this, so I'm going to make as much RAM as possible available to Skritter the next few sessions to see if there is any improvement.

Anyways, thanks again for all the responses.

Try disabling the wacom plugin if you're running it. It's a resource hog.

That does sound like the tip feel is set to really hard. One other user recently was having a problem where the tip feel would keep resetting itself.

Which browser , which os and which versions and wacom driver are you using ?

Make sure its not your antivirus continually scanning the wacom driver. Had this at work with macafee.

The pens shouldn't wear out if treated okay.
At home I'm using a second or third hand intuos gd-1212u which is at least 6 years old and still going strong

XP SP3 with Firefox 7.0, not sure about the Wacom driver, there's a few different types on my system, but it would have been the latest one from http://www.wacom.com/en/CustomerCare/Drivers.aspx?model=Bamboo+Pen+and+Touch&os=Windows+XP because I bought it well after the last driver came out and downloaded the latest one from here. None of that has changed over the past few weeks, though.

It's definitely not anti-virus, I generally try to avoid bloated things like McAfee. But this is a fairly old computer with only 2 gigs of RAM, and while that is plenty enough for a stripped-down XP, it appears that as ddapore99 and Byzanti mentioned, the Wacom driver is fairly RAM-hungry. I closed Skype and noticed an improvement, but if it keeps bothering me I'll rearrange my room and start Skrittering on my Core i5 with 6 gigs RAM on Windows 7.

I'm really glad to hear it's probably not a problem with the tablet or pen, though. I'm going to recheck the settings in the tablet setup too and see if something reverted back to default somehow.

Here I'm running win 7 64 bit ultimate sp 1
firefox 9.01 and chrome dev 18.0 on a E8400 with 8GB

At work win 7 64 with E8500 and 4GB ram with firefox 9 and chrome dev 18 and Fedora 16 E8400 with 4GB chrome dev

I prefer to use skritter on chrome. Seems slightly faster ( and the beta ios app seems faster again and more immersive)

On windows occasionally need to use the bamboo utility to delete the preferences otherwise it locks up.

Hi valymer - I didn't mean the driver was ram hungry, I meant the wacom plugin. Skritter uses this to get sensitivity data to make your strokes look nice. You can try turning this off by clicking settings when practising.