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Why Chrome lags and how to fix it

Q. I have a relatively new computer and haven’t installed many applications. Everything works great except for Google Chrome. When I’m typing a web address, filling out a form, or composing a new email, I see a lot of lag. I type something and a few seconds later it appears on my screen. Do you know how I can fix this?

A. I have encountered this problem on several computers and it really confused me at first. But after some research I found the solution.

Chrome has the ability to use something called hardware acceleration.

Hardware acceleration is a feature that allows Chrome to offload some processing to your video card. Or, more accurately, your graphics processing unit also known as a GPU.

This is supposed to take some of the load off the central processing unit (CPU) and allow the GPU to process more complex graphics.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work well with certain graphics hardware, and the result is a slower experience when using Chrome.

To see if this is the problem with your computer, you can disable hardware acceleration. To do this, open Chrome settings by clicking the three dots in the top right corner or by typing chrome://settings in the address bar and pressing Enter.

Go to Advanced, System and find the “Use hardware acceleration when available” setting and turn it off.

Restart Chrome and it should come back to life.

If you want to use hardware acceleration, your system may support it if you update your video drivers. Try doing that and then re-enable hardware acceleration to see if Chrome is more stable. Otherwise, you can leave that setting disabled as your system will not benefit from the feature.

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