Let’s see, the old chronometer tells me it’s the early part of March in the late afternoon and therefore time to address one of AppleWorks’ most common quirks. Reader Michael Streicher writes:
I have a G4 running OS X 10.2.8. When I use Appleworks 6.2.9, every 20 or 30 seconds, it pauses. First I get the spinning black and white ball, then the spinning colored beachball. The pauses can last from 5 to 30 seconds. They are so frequent, as to be really annoying. I have deleted and reloaded Appleworks; clean installed OSX, and deleted all the plists and cache’s related to Appleworks….
Let me stop you right there and direct your attention to AppleWorks’ Recent Items folder, which can be found by following this path: /Users/username/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/Starting Points/Recent Items. Open this folder and delete any aliases you find within (only the aliases, please). Once you’ve finished with the Recent Items aliases, move to /Users/YourName/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/AutoSave and delete the files in the Auto Save folder. AppleWorks should now be far more cooperative.
To save yourself some trouble in the future, launch Appleworks, select Preferences from the AppleWorks menu and then the General command from the submenu. Choose Files from the Topic pop-up menu in the resulting Preferences menu, disable the Auto-Save and Recent Items options, and click OK. AppleWorks will no longer populate these folders with items that can cause the program to stutter. (Of course you’ll also lose the benefit of tracked recent items and files that are automatically saved.)