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There seems to be something wrong with Powerdesk 5.41. When active it uses almost 20% CPU on a Pentium II 333@400. The drivers work just fine if you deactivate Powerdesk.
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System Configuration (this is my personnal server):
HARDWARE:
- AMD K6-III 450MHz CPU (not o/c)
- AOpen AX59Pro SS7 m/b w/lastest BIOS (VIA MVP3 CE rev. chipset)
- 256MB RAM PC100
- Matrox Marvel G200-TV (lastest BIOS) w/16MB & hardware DVD decoder (still don't know why I bought the DVD decoder crap) :-p
- SB16 ISA
- Maxtor 8.4Gb x 2 (PM & PS)
- Yamaha CDE2100E burner (SM)
- Mitsumi 48X CD-ROM (SS)
- Promise Ultra66 w/ 2 Maxtor 20Gb (1 master on each channel)
- LinkSys 100Mbit/s Ethernet card
- SMC 8019 10Mbit/s Ethernet card w/ Cable modem
- SupraExpress 56i ISA modem
- And all the rest...
SOFTWARE:
- Windows 2000 Professional SP2 French
- All the lastest VIA drivers
- DirectX 8.0a w/ Video Add-on patch
- Matrox PowerDesk + VideoTools (version changing frequently) ;-)
- IE 5.5
- Internet Connetion Sharing Server
- FTP Server (IIS)
- Maxtor 20Gb stripped using software Win2k RAID
Thats funny I have a K6-2 450 128 meg sdram and G400 32 SH and idle running 5.41's I have 96% system, 96% user and 98% GDI, when i disable pdesk.exe I get 98% system and 98% user. Maybe its just the g200 users?
We're talking about CPU idle time, not Windows system resources.
CPU idle time is the average amount of time that your processor spends doing absolutely nothing. It's usually expressed as a percentage of the actual elapsed time (thus, the term "idle time" is actually a misnomer). The more CPU-hungry background processes you have running, the lower your CPU idle time will be.
To obtain a measurement your computer's CPU idle time, you can use System Monitor, which comes with Windows. The item to add is Kernel: Processor Usage (%). Subtract the Processor Usage (%) figure from 100% to get the idle percentage.
I heard about this before I loaded the 5.41 drivers. So, I am using the 5.30 powerdesk with the 5.41 drivers.
1) I unzipped 5.41 into a directory, and unzipped the 5.30 in another.
2) I coped all the pd*.* files from 5.30 into 5.41.
3) I installed from this custom 5.41 directory. no problems at all.
---
System Configuration (this is my personnal server):
HARDWARE:
- AMD K6-III 450MHz CPU (not o/c)
- AOpen AX59Pro SS7 m/b w/lastest BIOS (VIA MVP3 CE rev. chipset)
- 256MB RAM PC100
- Matrox Marvel G200-TV (lastest BIOS) w/16MB & hardware DVD decoder (still don't know why I bought the DVD decoder crap) :-p
- SB16 ISA
- Maxtor 8.4Gb x 2 (PM & PS)
- Yamaha CDE2100E burner (SM)
- Mitsumi 48X CD-ROM (SS)
- Promise Ultra66 w/ 2 Maxtor 20Gb (1 master on each channel)
- LinkSys 100Mbit/s Ethernet card
- SMC 8019 10Mbit/s Ethernet card w/ Cable modem
- SupraExpress 56i ISA modem
- And all the rest...
SOFTWARE:
- Windows 2000 Professional SP2 French
- All the lastest VIA drivers
- DirectX 8.0a w/ Video Add-on patch
- Matrox PowerDesk + VideoTools (version changing frequently) ;-)
- IE 5.5
- Internet Connetion Sharing Server
- FTP Server (IIS)
- Maxtor 20Gb stripped using software Win2k RAID
I don't know if MouseWare is causing problems for others, but I also have the Logitech MouseMan Cordless 3 button scroll mouse, and I'm use mouseware, with no problems (that I can attribute to this software, anyhow).
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Ace
"..so much for subtlety.."
System specs:
Gainward Ti4600
AMD Athlon XP2100+ (o.c. to 1845MHz)
I have the following strange problem with latest powerdesk 5.41: my logitech mouse (a serial device) started to work bad and use of pointer is difficult. Everything goes fine if i kill PDesk using Ctrl+Alt+Del.
Good catch Angel. I never noticed or thought about that. But yeah, I was having problems with 5.41 originally myself, never looked at the CPU time it was eating, but it was a lot as the stuttering was very bad anytime DirectX would initialize. I'm using a Logitech wheelmouse on Win98 - don't have any of the mouseware loaded, just the native Win98 support for the wheel. There are 2 fixes available, one that I came up with and one that rylan caught. Mine is going to the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Matrox\PowerDesk\Versi on5\CurrentSettings and setting the value "PDEnable" to "00 00 00 00". This supposedly disables PDesk, but has no affect on the software what so ever. Rylan's fix was to replace al the pd*.* files in the 5.41 with the versions from 5.25. However, I have found that the problem file is pdkernel.dll (uninstalled is pdkernel.dl_). Replacing just pdesk.exe with the 5.25 version still gives stuttering, replacing pdkernel as well gets rid of the problem.
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I say "Here's a monkey wrench... If you bop me over the head with it long enough I might wake up for a second."
"I wrestled with reality for 27 years and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it."
Sorry for this question, but what is the utility of Pdesk ? Why it must be running like a "service" in Windows 98. I tried to kill it and everything seems to work fine without this task!
If it's use is not essential i'll disable using the key Pdenable how described in previous post.
Thanks to everyone investigating this issue...
Simone, I have been trying to figure that one out myself. If you use the desktop navigator or quickdesk, you also need pdesk running, but I know no one (gamers, anyway) that uses these utilities - who wants extra stuff running in the background and eating resources? With Pdesk disabled all the functions still work - all the extra tabs in the advanced display settings, custom monitor profiles, save / restore icons, etc.
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I say "Here's a monkey wrench... If you bop me over the head with it long enough I might wake up for a second."
"I wrestled with reality for 27 years and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it."
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