Windows 7 depreciating performance issue fixed

I know this is probably more worthy of a tweet but considering the amount of time I’ve spent with this, I though I’d get it out there on the blogosphere for archival and searching purposes.

At Microsoft’s PDC2009 last year, they put out some pretty sweet Windows 7 Ultimate laptops. For the last 6 months, I began to actually use it pretty heavily for development and other things. I noticed over time whether the laptop was simply sitting on the desk for a long period of time (open or closed), in standby mode, or even just hibernation, the performance would decrease over time. The RAM usage would be high but the CPU and all that was fine. After running a few process monitoring applications as well as RAM defraggers, I had no success in bringing the machine back to it’s “cold-boot” state. Even odder, I would notice that, when an application was running, when I initially would click on it in the taskbar to bring it up, it would literally take minutes to come back but oddly enough, as I used it, it became faster and faster as if it was caching itself again. So even though the laptop itself upon new application and the basic OS environment would be slow, applications themselves would catch back up to speed eventually (the Add Reference dialog in VS2010 was still atrociously slow though every time it opened ). The best thing was always to save whatever I was doing and then restart everytime… so basically I’d sit down, open the laptop and, if I was doing anything more than email checking, restart… this was faster than waiting for the application to catch up.

After extensive Googling, I never really found a solid solution… some people had similar situations but the one’s that had solutions were either getting rid of a windows service, changing out hardware, or reinstalling the OS. I gave up for a little while and just dealt with it… but recently installed Windows 7 on my desktop machine. I noticed real quick that my desktop machine could run for days and never experience this problem so I sat the laptop down side-by-side and called upon the computer gods to figure it out.

On the laptop, since it was my first venture into Win7, I added a few gadgets to the sidebar: CPU monitor, calendar, and clock. On my desktop Win7 machine, I just didn’t get around to using the sidebar. Although it took me a while to notice this, I decided this was enough to investigate as a difference. Lo and behold, I removed the sidebar from the PDC Win7 laptop and it is now just as speedy on the fifth day of using it as it was in the first 10 minutes.

So, just to clearly put it, turn off the sidebar in Windows 7 for optimal performance. Don’t know if anyone out there can apply this solution to the same problem with success but it doesn’t hurt.

You can turn off the sidebar by using the following instructions:

1. Open the control panel and click Programs and then Programs And Features. On the left panel, you’ll see “Turn Windows features on or off”.



2. Click the button/link and uncheck ‘Windows Gadget Platform’

3. Click OK and you’re finished.

The only bad thing is you don’t get to use the sidebar

NOTE: I’m not sure if turning off the sidebar or just getting rid of the gadgets I was using (CPU monitor, Calendar, Clock) make a difference so maybe if you need the sidebar, you could simply remove these gadgets and see which one is the problem.

UPDATE (07/13/2010): Looks like the sidebar has nothing to do with this… looks to be an Acer driver problem.

Overworked

Let’s not mention the new project I was supposed to have out last week…. it hasn’t made much progress as I’ve been very overworked at the moment. The good news is, I’ll be possibly some more snippets of things I find helpful simply because they’re much easier to work on and post about

The question is, when will I have time to post that? Not now

Now I gotta get this blog updated to the new version so cross your fingers.

Holy crap make the spam stop

So I guess now that this site has started to get a little traffic for some unknown reason, it’s climbing up a few charts and search engines… and a few spam bot lists too. Over the past 15 days, I’ve probably gotten over 10 emails day with spam bot comments. I guess over the next week or two I’ll be testing some of the anti-spam WordPress plugins and I’ll let y’all know which ones are worth grabbing. I’m actually using a few already including a recaptcha plugin but damned if it doesn’t stop the bots. If anyone has any recommendations, I’m all ears.

Anyway, as for actual posts related to what I’d like to converse on this site, I’ve been swamped with work and personal life but I hope to pick up speed. Ooh.. and on a sidenote, go Mississippi State Bulldogs with the big win over Vanderbilt this weekend

UPDATE: Well, I’m already using the top plugins for comment spam blocking so i decided to spend and hour or two adding words to the Spam Filter and so far so good…

UPDATE #2: Although I’ve got some custom things in place, here’s an excellent post at Speckboy which gives me a few plugins to try out to get ahead of the spammers.

Had to give out some props to Jing – Excellent screenshot utility

I’ve been using Jing for the last 6 months or so and absolutely love it. Honestly, I only use the screenshot functions but it makes things so much easier than diving into Paint.NET every time I want to highlight an object in my screenshots. This is especially useful when screenshotting my development applications and/or mockups. It even works great with WPF apps in auto-detecting containers. Although I tend to try to stay in the opensource software realm when possible, this app is pretty nice. The only thing I wish it had was, in addition to the ability to mark up the screenshot with a box, I’d like to create circles too…

As I read over this blog post, I hope it doesn’t sound too much like spam. I just wanted to get this product name out there in hopes that it can help free up others’ time where possible. It’s been a timesaver for me!

Getting back in the swing of things…

We had a beautiful baby girl on June 24th and I’m working my way back into things. I’ve got some exciting work coming up regarding a project I’ve been involved with for years and, as soon as the FSD is finished, I hope to post some exciting ideas I plan to implement with the project regarding data import/export techniques with a SQL backend. Just a quick mention, if you’re ever involved in anything regarding data importing/exporting from delimited text file formats, I strongly recommend investing some time with Fast CSV Reader. This library is pretty damn awesome and it can even be used as a source datareader for SQl Bulk Copy… more on that later! Happy coding!

Most useful random BlackBerry app of the day – Autolock (keypad lock after X seconds)

As I was upgrading the wife’s Blackberry to the latest OS, I happened across this nice little app. It adds the functionality to be able to lock your keypad X number of seconds/minutes after the screen dims (from a lack of use). Awesome app to prevent “booty” calls when you stick your Blackberry in your pocket without locking the keypad.

http://www.geekandproud.net/blackberry-software

Note: His link to the ALX/COD install is down and only has an OTA install. I did some further googling around and found this link to the ALX/COD install files – http://www.geekandproud.net/blackberry/autolock/autolock.zip

Migrating posts from my old blog

My old blog (http://blog.attobase.com) which was going to be centered around some open source work I was doing is having some issues. I planned on migrating the information from that blog over to this one eventually but with the recent problems, I’ll be doing this sooner rather than later. I hope to get most of that done this week. The project (a stored procedure which creates a delimited text file from SQL) will definitely be brought over since it seems to get a good handful of traffic from Google searches and does help a few folks out on occasion. I also have some posts about using OPENROWSET which might be helpful to a few…

Edit: Of course Dreamhost’s excellent support comes through and fixes it right up!

65 million seconds in the making…

And so it begins, yet another venture into the blogging world… this time without a specific topic (which hopefully will make it more useful for me). Over the next week or so, I’ll continue building the site but I thought I’d go ahead and release it to the world since the basic content is there.