Textpad performance = really slow

[Michael]

Recently I reinstalled Windows 98se and thus had to reinstall Textpad. Ever since then it has performed as if I am in a telnet session that is really lagged. If I type a sentence really quick I have to wait a second for the screen to catch up. When alt-tabbing to Textpad it takes a second or two for everything to show. Anyone else have this problem? I have an AMD Thunderbird 1ghz with 128mb ram and a Voodoo5. Everything on my computer else seems to work normally.

[William]

Yes, I have had this problem, and someone else did too. I posted about it a few weeks ago, but the message disappeared from the Forum. I am using a WinNT 4.0 machine with SP6a installed and the latest copy of TextPad (P3-733, 128mb of ram, ATI Rage Fury Pro VIVO video card). When I registered my copy of textpad all the problems disappeared (save one), including the slow startup time, the slow typing problems (I would get about 6-10 characters ahead of textpad when typing normally, just like using Telnet over a congested link), and it would take up to 10 seconds to open a 2k text file. TextPad was also noticably slow repainting the window after it was uncovered.

I wasn't going to register because of the performance issues, but I figured it was a good editor anyways so I decided to just blow the US$24 for it. Am I glad I did. Again I don't know _WHY_ it worked, but it worked for me. I would like an explanation though, and I would like to know if this problem will occur again. (If it was a nag-ware feature I wonder how many sales they have lost due to it).

One performance note though, if you set up file associations you may want to disable DDE. For some unknown reason opening files using DDE is still terribly slow (again we are talking 10 seconds on a P3-733), but this was the last of my performance problems. Go to the file associations dialog box found in Windows Explorer to disable it for each file type associated with TextPad (Click on My Computer to get into explorer then go View->Options->File Types Tab->select file extension and hit the Edit button->select an action [say open] from the list and then hit Edit). With DDE enabled it took considerably longer to open an associated file type (of course when you do this it will pop up another copy of textpad each time you double click or 'run' an associated file type instead of just opening a copy of the file in a already running copy of TextPad).

[Anthony Missico, Jr.]

DDE is horribly slow on occasions if Outlook is opened. This is a familiar problem and there are documented cases in Microsoft Knowledge Base. In addition, InstallShield will take forever to initialize if Outlook is opened. I never "spied" on InstallShield to figure out why. There is another common application that I cannot think of at the moment that will also cause TextPad to take "forever" to open a document via DDE.

The cause comes down to DDE is not being handled properly by an application on the system.

[hellRaven]

I've got the same problem...
A week ago i installed Textpad on my old PC (K6-2 450MHZ) and found it was a cool editor - but very slow. So i installed it on my new machine hoping the performance would be better - nothing. My new PC is a 1GHz Thunderbird... so what's up with this bad performance? first i thought it was a "feature" of the unregistered version. I thought about registering but than (hopefully) i found the post above saying that even the registered version is performing so slow...
Are there any reasons for this strange behaviour of Textpad?

[Moderator]

Please try the following:

1. Exit from TextPad.
2. Click Start/Run and run REGEDIT.EXE.
3. Select the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Helios\TextPad 4\License
4. Choose Edit/Rename and rename "License" to "License.bak".
5. Start TextPad.

If that helps, choose Registry/Export and export "License.bak" to a file.
Please send it to support@textpad.com and we will look into the cause.

[The Doctor]

I just tried the 'license.bak' registry trick, with no result.
I also see the slow emptying of the keyboard buffer, slow redraws, and slow movement of the highlight in block select mode.
I use Ghost to backup my whole system in one file, so I can test an installed program in exactly repeatable conditions...
I do not see this problem in v4-0, only in v4-4. (I've not tried intermediate releases.)
My system is W95 osr2c, running on an AMD K6-2 500 with all necessary extra support long established, so many other programs are known to be fine on it.

[The Doctor]

I just tried the 'license.bak' registry trick, with no result.
I also see the slow emptying of the keyboard buffer, slow redraws, and slow movement of the highlight in block select mode.
I use Ghost to backup my whole system in one file, so I can test an installed program in exactly repeatable conditions...
I do not see this problem in v4-0, only in v4-4. (I've not tried intermediate releases.)
My system is W95 osr2c, running on an AMD K6-2 500 with all necessary extra support long established, so many other programs are known to be fine on it.

[Andrew Oakley]

I get this slow performance too with v4.2, v4.3 and v4.4. I registered for v3 but this slow performance is putting me off registering for v4.

I get it on all the following setups:

- AMD Duron 800 with 128mb PC133 RAM, PC Chips mobo, Win98SE, IE5.5, Creative GeForce2MX graphics 32mb DDR

- AMD K6-2 400 with 64mb EDO RAM, AOpen mobo, Win98SE, IE5.5, Guillemot Pheonix 3DFX Voodoo Banshee graphics 16mb

- AMD K6-2 400 with 96mb EDO RAM, PC Chips mobo, Win98SE, IE5.5, onboard SIS graphics 4mb

- Intel P233MMX with 128mb EDO RAM, unknown mobo, Win98SE, IE5.5, S3 Virge graphics 4mb

- Intel Celeron 600 with 256mb PC100 RAM, unknown mobo, WinNT4SP6, IE5.0, Grafix Star graphics 4mb

- Intel Celeron 600 with 256mb PC100 RAM, unknown mobo, WinSBS (Small Business Server == NT4) SP6, IE5.0, Grafix Star graphics 4mb

Basically the symptoms are that I can type way faster than the display can catch up with me. After I have typed about eight words, the display is still printing out the fourth or fifth. I can keep typing but the display lags further and further behind.

[moderator]

Andrew

Please send in your registry key to support@textpad.com:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Helios\TextPad 4\Licensesettings

We have sinced solved the Doctors problem.

[The Doctor]

Absolutely! Thankyou, Heidi.
Is it possible that there could be more than one reason for the problem?
Anyone reading this should note that it is not essentially a problem with
TextPad itself, which is worth more than it costs.

PS. Sorry about the double post. Small accident with a page refresh.