Fences causes epic slowdown in performance of desktop

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Briansama | Discussion: Stardock Support General

Fences started out fast enough, then as I got more icons I suppose it decided to slow down everything. When I close it and just have my ~40 icons on my desktop everything is fast as normal. Exaple of slowness, dragging and dropping is delayed, double clicking or pressing escape to show or hide fences takes 5+ seconds to occur now.

 

I have a pentium D dual core 2.8Ghz processor, 3GB RAM, GeForce 9800GTX+ graphics card... I run at 3% CPU usage max on idle, usually 0% though naturally. Windows XP SP3. Nothing else is causing a slowdown, just fences, I have done checks on everything else to make sure.

 

Any suggestions would be wonderful!

 

Also wanted to make a suggestion, an option to not hide icons outside of a fence when you hide fences. Mine does this and I do not want it to. Any idea on this as well would be cool!

Jafo
Reply #1 Friday, November 6, 2009 5:14 AM

I have 63 icons in 3 fences...no slowdown in Win 7.

However...

I did notice a serious slowdown in Explorer yesterday, my time...possibly connected to a Windows update.

Does your issue disappear if you reboot?

Briansama
Reply #2 Friday, November 6, 2009 5:16 AM

sadly, no it does not. I have been threw 3 reinstalls of windows in the time I have used Fences. It was reinstalled and eventually slowed me down like it does now.

Jafo
Reply #3 Friday, November 6, 2009 5:31 AM

That's odd....I don't have Fences on XP...yet...so cannot compare stories...but it has been fine on 3 vers of Win 7 and on Vista.

My guess would be a conflict between Fences and something else.

I'll relocate this thread to 'support'.

Give it a little time and someone will catch up to assist...

Briansama
Reply #4 Friday, November 6, 2009 5:38 AM

forgive the double post, but this is SOLVED.

 

I had this issue by having ~6 fences, idk why but this seemed to destroy my performance. I moved some stuff from my desktop, and limited it to 3 fences and it is back to normal fast speed. Seems to be a problem with my computer not liking that many fences.

 

Thanks everyone.

Jafo
Reply #5 Friday, November 6, 2009 5:48 AM

Glad it's solved...but it shouldn't be a problem with the number of them...unless your system is being taxed to the limit by something else.

The backroom boys may yet want to get more info...or try to replicate it.

Briansama
Reply #6 Friday, November 6, 2009 6:05 AM

Whatever you guys need.

 

Specs:

Pentium D Process 2.8Ghz

3GB Kingston Ram

9800GTX+

Windows XP Professional SP3

I run 3 monitors at the moment, had this issue with 1, 2 and now 3 montors so I doubt that's it.

I run Steam and Windows Live Messenger on a permanent basis, and my computer runs near 24/7. I check temps and performance daily due to that, and nothing is wrong. I run Avast! free edition antivirus.

 

If you need anything else, let me know!

Lantec
Reply #7 Friday, November 6, 2009 7:26 AM

Do you have any network folder links on your desktop? Just curious.....I had an issue with Object Dock a few years ago that was caused by a network folder.

gnnbtrn
Reply #8 Friday, November 6, 2009 2:10 PM

I got the same problem with performance.

My PC configuration is:

At work:

Windows XP Pro sp2

Pentium 4 3GHz

RAM 512 Mb

 

and at home

Windows XP home sp3

Pentium 4 3.2GHz

RAM 4Gb

 

the Fences are causing significant slowdown on the system.

Normally I ran thre programs at the same time : Lightroom,  Firefox and Winamp.

At this combination I cannot access desktop fast, it takes forever to display it.

and anything I do is very slugish.

I have 72 icons and 7 fences

 

Once I uninstall the Fences the system flies.

I cannot accept the idea to limit the number of Fences to 3. It is killing the idea of Fences if they have to be limited.

Sorry to tell, but I have to uninstall Fences on both machines and wait if there is a resolution. I love fences, it makes the desktop so neat.

 

 

Shirley
Reply #9 Friday, November 6, 2009 6:27 PM

Make sure you're using the latest version here:

https://www.stardock.com/products/fences/downloads.asp

zakai1369
Reply #10 Friday, November 6, 2009 9:30 PM

Also wanted to make a suggestion, an option to not hide icons outside of a fence when you hide fences. Mine does this and I do not want it to. Any idea on this as well would be cool!

 

Right click each of the icons that you don't want to hide and the first option on the menu under Open should be "Exclude this icon from Fences' quick-hide"

CCdeQueen
Reply #11 Friday, November 6, 2009 9:48 PM

I am also experiencing a huge slow down with the latest Fences Pro.  I only had two fences and still had to disable the programto do anything at all.  I am running XP on my old computer (AMD Athalon 64 processor3500+ and 1G RAM.)  Hopefully Fences will work better on my new machine which arrives in a week.  I love this program.  You guys have to fix this problem.

Briansama
Reply #12 Saturday, November 7, 2009 10:03 AM

I agree, this is a huge problem. I did not like limiting my fences, but I would rather have that than just have icons...

 

Hopefully it will be looked at by Stardock.

milksama
Reply #13 Monday, November 9, 2009 6:48 PM

What kind of videocard/driver version is anyone with this problem using? It's possible that it just might not be handling the transparency well at all.


Mike

Shirley
Reply #14 Monday, November 9, 2009 11:19 PM

Also check to make sure your video drivers are up to date,  My XP box is running an Athlon 3500 with an 6800GS and have at least half a dozen fences with no performance issues.  In Briansama's case I'm not sure that the system is the limiting factor.  Do you have any other software that loads in the desktop that would be conflicting.  DeskScapes and Fences are definitely a no go at the same time on XP, and there may be others.

Briansama
Reply #15 Tuesday, November 10, 2009 6:58 PM

I thought it might of been DisplayFusion at one point. Gives me a taskbar for my second monitor. But I uninstalled it and still the same. Just switched to windows 7 and don't seem to have a problem, although I have only 3 fences...

milksama
Reply #16 Friday, November 13, 2009 3:22 PM

Glad to hear the issue hasn't returned since you've improved your OS If it does, however, be sure to let us know.


Mike

agentid36
Reply #17 Thursday, September 23, 2010 2:42 PM

hi, I'm definitely having this problem too;

Laptop
Windows 7 x64
NVidia GeForce 8400M GS; Driver 258.96 WHQL (current WHQL drivers) (though I'll be trying the latest beta drivers soon, I'll not if they change anything)
Core 2 Duo 2.2ghz
3GB Ram

One thing that I noted, the performance of icons on the desktop gets really bad when I start CTRL+clicking on more than one icon. I can use the 'box' click+drag over multiple icons to select them fine, but CTRL+click seems to have really, really, REALLY poor performance (it may be related to the border that is shown around an icon when a mouse hovers over one, while you have other icons selected). The performance of dragging a fence around is pretty poor as well. I think your suspicion regarding transparency is probably correct (or perhaps you are not using asynchronous calls correctly, or not at all? I would kinda presume that the desktop in windows is multithreaded....). If it turns out that transparency is the issue, I would very much appreciate the option to disable transparency for fences, unless/until you get the performance issue resolved.

I have 4 fences; I removed one so I had three, but that did not help.

mgevorki
Reply #18 Saturday, September 25, 2010 5:56 AM

ditto, same issues as agentid36 is having.

This makes using fences pro very difficult, and rather annoying. 

 

win 7 x64

q6600

6gb ram

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