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#1
Gadget speed problem in Windows 7
I wonder if anyone here experiences any abnormal slowdown of Sidebar gadgets, or some abnormally high CPU usage by the sidebar.exe process itself...?
I have been working on a gadget called "System Animator" (can be found on my Windows Sidebar Gadget Gallery) which is focused on animations and flashy eye candies (yeah, a rare use for a gadget). It runs perfectly fine on Vista. But in the past few months, I have been receiving reports from Windows 7 beta users saying that my gadget runs very slowly on Windows 7. The latest report (from someone using RTM) notices some abnormal CPU usage by the sidebar.exe process besides some sluggish animation performance (in his case, an idle animation still uses 15-20% CPU, and quickly jumps to 40% when the animation is running at like just 1fps, while in Vista it is 0% when idle, 5% average when the animation is running at the full speed of 10fps). Some of these users have CPU much faster than mine, so it can't be a system speed issue. My gadget basically just uses the standard HTML elements and native Sidebar JavaScript API (g:background, g:image, etc) with no Flash, Java or any external ActiveX controls used, so I don't see why there is such a significant performance difference on Windows 7.
I have been working with one of the users who reported the problem, and so far I have found out that any kind of screen updates on a g:background object with a stretched image (even if it is just a dummy transparent image) cause an abnormal amount of CPU usage. The size of the image used as the g:background also matters. In general, Windows 7 sidebar is just SLOWER than the Vista version.
I appreciate any comments or expriences that you guys can share on this matter.