[Dx4win] Windows 7 64-Bit Pauses and Freezes (UPDATE)

[Byron Peebles]

Unfortunately, my QSO with HP1 tonight was interrupted by numerous 
pauses, making me feel like I was learning morse code again.  Which I 
might actually be doing, to tell the truth.

Another examination of the Task Manager showed the Firefox 4 32-bit 
executable doing battle with the Firefox add-on container executable for 
top spot in the CPU usage list.  This might be because there is an issue 
with Firefox *32 under Windows 7 64-bit that is exaggerated by the use 
of these add-ons on the QRZ.com web pages, which I use as my home page 
in the shack.  I went into the Help menu of Firefox and disabled add-ons 
and the test (under full power) seemed to show the lag/pause was gone.  
Only real operating will prove that.  More later.

I want to say that with each item I have removed, from Aero Themes, to 
MSFT Office doc caches, to Adobe Startup executables, the system has 
become more responsive.  The fact I now have voice announcements in the 
shack (rather than keying the radio) is a major plus.

Now all I have to do is get the pause outa here.

I have asked a friend who is active on the Firefox development forums to 
let me know if they hear something about the add-on container and 
Windows 7 64-bit.

73, Byron

On 06/05/2011 07:45 PM, Byron Peebles wrote:
> Friends:
>
> Using the Task Manager and the Configuration Manager resource 
> mentioned in the previous post, I am feeling better about eliminating 
> the problems I was experiencing with my Windows 7 Ultimate system and 
> DX4WIN.
>
> First, the change from the Display Windows Manager (dwm.exe) from Aero 
> to Classic themes seems to have made the windows faster.  As I 
> continued to look for anything that used more resources than DX4WIN, I 
> also removed a Microsoft Office utility that is for shared document 
> caching.  It seems like the Install script for Office adds that to 
> your Startup programs and I will never share an Office document from 
> this computer.  then, two Adobe Acrobat products installed themselves 
> to make my PDF reading faster in some way and they are now not part of 
> the system startup and background processes.  When these changes are 
> combined, the system behaves better, at least so far.
>
> Second, I found a configuration error in the system that had really 
> bad side effects.  When I was attempting to get the MMTTY RTTY 
> software working, I have set the audio output device to default to my 
> Ten-Tec 712 USB-Sound-Card Interface.  I had also set the Mic input to 
> PTT on the Ten-Tec radio.  The result of this mistake is that my 
> system sounds, startup, spots, etc were being routed to the radio, not 
> the speakers, and were keying the radio.  Not at all a good thing, 
> since I have to assume those sounds could be heard, even though I set 
> the radio to one watt output when I'm not in QSO, just in case.
>
> So, one set of changes to minimize overheads on the combined CPU/GPU 
> of a low-end, low-power motherboard and a secon change to reverse a 
> bonehead configuration mistake that I made in a last-ditch effort to 
> make something unrelated to DX4WIN work.
>
> Again, time is the real measure of resolution, so I'll give it a week 
> or two of active CW work to see if this is truly resolve.
>
> 73, Byron
>