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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Tue Feb 23, 2016 6:40 pm 
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Yes, I think I understand now. I did hit the same thread multiple times to look at the stack. I just dumped all the various stacks into the list I posted earlier. I will take a look again later to see if there is a pattern.


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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Tue Feb 23, 2016 7:49 pm 
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Quote:
Is the DVD drive on your laptop really assigned the letter O: ?


It was drive letter F: but then I changed it to see if it made any difference, it didn't.


Quote:
That 4/1 means the Load Media function is not supported. My guess is that your DVD drive is able to eject media but not load it in without manual intervention. Am I right?


Yes, it is a laptop so it only ejects. The tray remained closed and never opens when attempting to use the CD Control icon.

When I try your old eject item it works, however when I close and then re-open the dock the old eject item switches over to the CD Control button.

https://youtu.be/6CFncbMN9RE


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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Wed Feb 24, 2016 9:49 am 
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this wrote:
Yes, it is a laptop so it only ejects. The tray remained closed and never opens when attempting to use the CD Control icon.


Ok, that's it then - remember the CD Control first tries to close the CD tray (aka load the media) and uses the time it takes to complete this action to decide if the CD door was already closed (a CD tray that is already closed returns almost immediately), in which case it then tries to open the tray door.

Since closing the CD door returns an error, it never gets to try the eject action. But this is easy to fix given the error code. :)

this wrote:
When I try your old eject item it works, however when I close and then re-open the dock the old eject item switches over to the CD Control button.


Yes, this is by design, since the new CD Control internal command is designed to replace those other internal commands.

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Jorge Coelho
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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 9:59 pm 
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Something new I managed to encounter, when the Mouse over effect is set to Zoom, the icon, before mousing over is slightly blurry. This was buggin' me because I know my icons are sharp and my resolution is sharp so it was like something was wrong with my eyes.

But then when I turned off the zoom effect to none, the icon resorts to its original sharp resolution.

Not sure if this is true for any other mouse over effect, but for the Zoom effect it happens on my system.

Easier to see when the dock icon size is larger like 64 or more.


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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 1:02 pm 
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Nutrynion wrote:
Something new I managed to encounter, when the Mouse over effect is set to Zoom, the icon, before mousing over is slightly blurry.


Well caught, thanks.

I somehow made a mistake when implementing the new 'Enable double caching of icons' performance setting, and instead of using the High Quality *Bicubic* interpolation mode to redraw the resized icon images into the secondary cache, I used High Quality *Bilinear*. This is what was causing the blurriness.

Doh.

Fixed for next release.

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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 6:51 pm 
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It's all so fascinating you actually understand the incredible microscopic details of what all that is that causes it. I just see it. But you dissect it.Ha.


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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 7:03 pm 
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Nutrynion wrote:
It's all so fascinating you actually understand the incredible microscopic details of what all that is that causes it. I just see it. But you dissect it.Ha.


I make these things, I have to.

As long as I am able to reproduce an issue here, I can fix it.

The problem is with stuff that I cannot reproduce (such as Winstep applications using a lot of CPU on a handful of systems). That type of stuff is usually caused by some weird (and very rare!) combination of hardware-software.

If I can't reproduce it here I don't know what is causing the problem, and so I can't fix or work-around it.

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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 03, 2016 3:11 pm 
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Ok, I think I am going to make a v16.3 public maintenance release.

I think I fixed all the bugs that were reported to me.

The three issues I was unable to fix because I could not reproduce them here seem to affect only a handful of users in a universe of tens of thousands, and are therefore *probably* system specific.

They are

a) constant high CPU usage (and I even added a CPU usage watchdog - as I did to solve the RAM usage bug a couple of years ago - to v16.2 that made it extremely easy to report a problem) but only got a single isolated report, plus another single report concerning NextSTART.

That RAM usage issue also only happened under *very specific* circumstances and I still got enough reports to find the pattern. This CPU usage issue seems to be even more rare than that.

b) application is frozen after returning from sleep. Again, a single user complaining about this problem.

The issue seems related to the High Resolution Multimedia Timers used for the animations, but that is a well know problem that was fixed YEARS ago. I even tried making a special version of the MM Timer DLL that closed any remaining possibilities and, according to the user, that seemed to help but did not fix the problem.

What is happening here doesn't make any sense to me at this point.

c) Settings not being retained after exiting the application.

Again, this only seems to affect a couple of users. Apparently the settings are there and ok in the Windows Registry, they just aren't being loaded when the application starts - and it thus applies the defaults again.

Doesn't make sense either because Restoring from a Backup file seems to fix the problem - until the application is restarted again. If it was a problem with the settings themselves, the backup should fail to load as well.

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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Fri Mar 04, 2016 1:54 pm 
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Jorge, it's apropos that you mentioned the things you did. I want to make sure that I post this before the v16.3 public maintenance release you mentioned above.

Remember the problem I was having with the external CD/DVD drawer that I said I was going to send you (hope you didn't think I was serious) taking about 7 seconds to reopen so you can reproduce the problem and fix it?

What happened was I applied an update from one of the programs (Driver Booster 3) I posted in the Off Topic forum and then the icon on the dock didn't work. I considered not dealing with it because of the time I've devoted and stress I've been experiencing because of a family member's declining health very recently but sucked it up and soldiered on. The dock icon then displayed the PC drawer drive (instead of the external one) so now I had two icons showing the same drive.

I then went to Computer and lo and behold, the external drive wasn't displayed. I unplugged and reinserted the USB and power cords several times and nothing happened. Finally after about the sixth time the drive displayed in Computer.

I clicked on the dock icon I assigned for the external drawer and it opened and displayed the correct drive. I opened and closed it repeatedly in rapid succession like I did with the PC drawer and it's apparent that the process alleviated the problem of the slow response of the drawer opening and the dock hanging and it too now works flawlessly.

And yes, as you stated I know that using the drawer in that manner isn't the proper way to use it. :) Yes, probably unorthodox, but I use it as a testing process and think it's a very effective way to expose any bugs or flaws in the system, hardware, drivers, applications and/or software related to the drawer.


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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2016 7:12 pm 
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Jorge...

Thanks for your hard work on this product and the updates you offer. I have tried so many different things to work around the freezing/high cpu usage upon returning back from sleep.

My ultimate suspicion is that it is something baked directly into the power settings of the Microsoft Surface series machines. The reason I say that only two of us have reported these issues and both of us were on Surface machines. It also should be noted that I have the problem now on a second Surface Pro 3.

If there was only some way for Nexus to shutdown before entering sleep and restart after sleep without me having to do it manually. :P

Thanks again for your help and hard work!


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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2016 7:49 pm 
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bubbamcgee wrote:
My ultimate suspicion is that it is something baked directly into the power settings of the Microsoft Surface series machines. The reason I say that only two of us have reported these issues and both of us were on Surface machines. It also should be noted that I have the problem now on a second Surface Pro 3.


Wow. I hadn't made that connection yet - good catch.

Last time something like this happened (a few years ago, Winstep applications would crash when opening the Control Panel tab in the Shelf or display a menu showing the contents of the Windows Control Panel, but only on systems with a Logitech web cam) I ended up having to buy a Logitech cam to figure out what was happening and *work-around* the problem.

There was no 'fix' because the bug was not in the Winstep applications themselves, but in the Logitech's control panel applet which corrupted the stack of any application that tried to enumerate the contents of the Windows Control Panel. Explorer itself did not crash because it is somewhat protected from buggy applications bringing down the whole system with them (which, in turn, provided no incentive for Logitech to fix the issue).

A Surface Pro 3 is a heavy investment, however, and I already have a nice laptop, don't need another one lol

On the other hand... don't those actually have *two* batteries? One for the keyboard and another for the detachable tablet/screen component? And, if so, aren't you using the new Winstep's battery module?

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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2016 8:04 pm 
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Hmmm... that is an interesting thought. As I understand it, the keyboard does not have an extra battery. It draws its power through the connection to the pc itself. But, I could be wrong. I will disconnect the keyboard and let pc sleep to see if the issue is still there. If not, then maybe it is an issue with the keyboard.


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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Sun Mar 06, 2016 8:25 pm 
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bubbamcgee wrote:
Hmmm... that is an interesting thought. As I understand it, the keyboard does not have an extra battery. It draws its power through the connection to the pc itself. But, I could be wrong. I will disconnect the keyboard and let pc sleep to see if the issue is still there. If not, then maybe it is an issue with the keyboard.


No, never mind, I forgot you were already having this issue with the free version of Nexus (right?), and that one does not feature a battery module, which kills my theory that this might be somehow related to the new battery module instead.

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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 07, 2016 5:04 pm 
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Ok, I'm going to muddy the water a bit. I believe that I've narrowed down the issue. I removed the clock and weather modules from the dock. Upon waking the pc from sleep, I experienced no high cpu usage, nor was the dock frozen. So, it's possible the issue is within one of those two modules. I will do more testing today and report back if I've discover anything more.


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 Post subject: Re: Version 16.2 officially released. Post any issues here.
PostPosted: Mon Mar 07, 2016 5:22 pm 
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bubbamcgee wrote:
Ok, I'm going to muddy the water a bit. I believe that I've narrowed down the issue. I removed the clock and weather modules from the dock. Upon waking the pc from sleep, I experienced no high cpu usage, nor was the dock frozen. So, it's possible the issue is within one of those two modules. I will do more testing today and report back if I've discover anything more.


Hmmm... both those modules retrieve information from the Internet. In v16.2 the Weather module was also set to refresh as soon as the system came back from 'Sleep'.

When the modules are retrieving info from the net, they play the 'Attention' effect (unless you disabled the 'Glow when updating' setting in the Settings dialog of each of the modules). So make sure the Attention effect is set to something really visible (for instance, Sonic Boom is a good one) and watch what happens when the dock returns from Sleep.

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