How to disable "update spectrogram"

[pascal mic]

Im running Audacity 1.3.11-beta on a very slow laptop with Windows XP. While recording, I've experienced problems with breaks and pauses which are caused, I guess, by the slowness of my laptop. Ive read the tutorials and find out that disabling the "update spectrogram" and the "autoscroll while playing" features I could avoid these breaks. The problem is that I don`t have the option to disable these features on the "preferences" menu. In fact, the menu is quite different from the one showned on the tutorials. Is this because I have a Beta version? Is there another way to disable these features?

[steve]

Don't use the Spectrogram view, by default tracks should be on the "Waveform" view. To change the track view, click on the name of the track and select from the drop down menu, To avoid the waveform view being refreshed during playback, either zoom out to show the entire waveform before you playback, or select from the Preferences:
Edit menu > Preferences > Tracks > Update display while playing = OFF (not selected).

See here for some other suggestions: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Troub ... ings#Skips