Running Series: Win 7/Vista Aggravations (Part 1)

Welcome to the first part of a running series where I rant about problems specific to high-performance Windows 7 installations and provide some insight into addressing them (and ultimately, the solution). Due to the close similarities, the problems encountered here and the solutions provided wiill almost certainly be extendable to Windows Vista and possibly, other Microsoft technologies.

Contents

1. IE Tabs
2. MSN Tray Icon
3. Synergy Quirks

[Back to series]

Problem 1 - Creating a new tab in IE7 and IE8 takes forever. This has bugged me for the longest time and I only recently had the time to stop and take a look at this. For the most part, I've used Internet Explorer faithfully (since version 3) and almost exclusively. From time to time I may run FireFox or Chrome on a temporary basis although to be honest, the only alternative browser I can stand for long term use might be Opera.

Regardless, my performance standard was IE6 and it will forever hold a very dear spot in my IT-heart for it's absolute sheer performance. When I say performance, I don't mean page-load times (because, almost no matter how inefficient the browser is, your connection will offer several order of mangitudes more latency) and I certainly am not referring to the memory usage or cpu usage. What I am referring to is how fast I can [a] open IE6 and [b] open a new instance of IE6 (since IE6 doesn't have tabbed browsing).

In IE6, you simply snap CTRL+N, AL+D and you start typing your new url. No matter how fast you execute that (provided your system isn't bogged down with something else of course), your keystrokes are executed as you type them. Try that in FireFox and you have about half-a-second of delay for the new tab or the new window to fire up. Sure the half-second latency isn't a big deal in and of itself except your keystrokes arent buffered for that time. This results in only the second half of the url being entered into the address bar. Fail. Before anyone complains that IE6 was "cheating" because it was already loaded into the system on startup .. too bad. Like a good little end-user, I am only concerned about the results. If there was an option to install the browser engine for an alternative browser to reduce new-tab/new-window launch time to < 200ms, than I'd be all over it -- provided the ALT+D shortcut was preserved (early versions of FireFox didn't have this shortcut).

In any case, this couldn't last. With the obsession with tabbed browsing and the introduction of IE7 and later, IE8, the transition resulted in massive load times for new tabs (oddly enough, the load time for a new window was still manageable.  By long load times, I am talking about 5-10 seconds to fire up a new tab as it sat there with the "Connecting..." page title. Quick search through Google results suggests disabling addons although it doesn't seem to help everyone (myself included).

Solutions
Some or all of these may be of help:

1. Disable third party extensions (i.e. Skype addon, Google search bar etc). I don't use these anyways so it's of no loss to me (likewise, it also does nothing to boost new-tab load times). If you need specific addons, you can manually disable/remove addons via the Manage Addons manager.
2. Switch to a blank page. By default IE shows you the about:tabs page which takes a long time to load. For me this offered the biggest improvement. While it doesn't match IE6's new-window loadtime, it's definitely in the realm of tolerable.
3. Use 64bit IE where possible. Personally, the only time I use 32bit IE is when I need to work with Flash (as it doesn't support 64bit) and then, I have greatly reduced expectations (as Flash is terrible in terms of efficiency and performance).
4. You may need to re-register some DLLs. For most people, this won't make a difference as it's only really the systems where the settings are in a serious state of disrepair that this will actually be the case.

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Problem 2 - Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN) doesn't show up in the system tray. This is a wierd problem to track down in terms of generalities. I have multiple Windows 7 and Windows Vista setups and this problem, so far, has only cropped up once. Essentially, when you close/minimize MSN, it simply minimizes to the "quick launch" bar and doesn't give you an icon in the system tray which we've all gotten used to.

Solution
It's not really elegant and you may have to reapply the fix when MSN gets updated and this issue may ultimately be fixed and not require this workaround, but you just have to run MSN in compatability mode. From the list of available modes, try the options from most-recent to least-recent until you find one that works. For me, the 'Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)' option (which is the latest available compatability mode at the time of writing) gets the icon in the for me.

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Problem 3 - Synergy tray icon doesn't show up and the "test" functionality works but the "actual" functionality doesn't. A little background summary, Synergy is a utility that allows for mouse and keyboard commands to be transmitted through the network so that you can control another machine's mouse/keyboard with your own. It differs from remote-desktop in that the other computer doesnt need to be signed-out (this effectively means the other computer can be controlled both via the mouse/keyboard that is physically hooked up to it or via Synergy). This video pretty much shows what Synergy is all about.

Now about the problems: the system tray problem is similar to that for the Windows Live Messenger (MSN) problem listed above however the issue of the test-functionality is a bit more perplexing. For this issue, when you have finished setting up Synergy and you click the test functionality, everything works. So then you start your server/client and, even though the tray icon indicates that it is connected, nothing works (i.e., your mouse/keyboard commands are not transmitted).

Solutions

• To fix the tray-icon problem, you need to run the synergy application (synergy.exe) in compatability mode. Again, try the different compatability modes from most-recent to least-recent. For me, 'Windows Vista (Service Pack 1)' was the most recent compatability mode that worked.
• The other issue is related to the auto-start functionality. If you set Synergy to start 'When Computer Starts', you will have this problem however if you use 'When You Log In', the problem goes away. This has to do with how Windows 7/Vista handles services. For a quick workaround, you have have the system automatically logon for you and Synergy will fire up as soon as the automatic login is complete. I'm not entirely sure about how to fix this issue for those users that need synergy to work on the login page (i.e. to type in your credentials over the network). It's possible that Vista Syn or Fire Daemon may be of help.