Procoder Express slow to start up after Defrag.

[andris]

My PC was working fine but I decided to do a bit of house keeping.
I did a [Disk Cleanup ] , followed by a [ Check Disk ], followed by [ Defrag ] and everything went smoothly.

However, my ProCoder Express for Edius 4.24 now takes about a minute (!) to load, when operating in stand-alone mode. After double-click, the hourglass appears, goes off after a few seconds and then it's a long, long wait before the [Welcome] window appears.
From within Edius it takes about 5 - 10 seconds ( which still seems slow ).
Once going it seems to work fine.
No other program seems to be much different with respect to start-up speed.

Before the "house keeping" episode, PCE would start like any other normal program.

There was another peculiar side effect of the "maintenance". About half of my Excel files have had the font size changed. I can live with this but waiting nearly a minute for PCE to fire up bugs me.

Using Control Panel I have done an Uninstall / Re-install of PCE, but no difference.

Any clues as to what I should do next ?

[GrassValley_BH]

I did a [Disk Cleanup ] , followed by a [ Check Disk ], followed by [ Defrag ] and everything went smoothly.

However, my ProCoder Express for Edius 4.24 now takes about a minute (!) to load, when operating in stand-alone mode. After double-click, the hourglass appears, goes off after a few seconds and then it's a long, long wait before the [Welcome] window appears.

It should be precisely the opposite - things should be the same or faster after a defrag, if the slowdown was being caused by fragmentation in the first place.

There was another peculiar side effect of the "maintenance". About half of my Excel files have had the font size changed. I can live with this but waiting nearly a minute for PCE to fire up bugs me.

This leads me to believe there is some other system-wise problem here. Perhaps there was corruption on the disk and CHKDSK rebuilt and/or pruned the filesystem.

Defragmenting a drive puts the drive through a good amount of wear - there's a lot of seeking, reading and writing going on. This has the possibility to take a system that runs OK under normal load into a dangerous heat zone. This is especially true if you don't have a well-ventilated case or you have many drives in close proximity. Drives don't like heat. Too much heat will kill them.

Now would be a good time to back things up.

[andris]

While PCE is "spinning it's wheels" for a full minute after double clicking it's icon - is there anything I can look at to get a clue as to what is causing this prolonged delay on start up ?

Keep in mind that when it opens up within Edius, it only takes a few seconds.

FYI : 2.8GHz PC, 1GB RAM & Storm 2 card installed.

[GrassValley_BH]

Have you previously run it and loaded files from a network location that is no longer available? References to network shares that aren't available can cause the system to pause for a couple of minutes on any app.

[antonsvideo]

also, what drive is used for PCE? IDE? SATA? SCSI?

if IDE, is it possible it jumped into PIO mode, this would explain your problem with PCE

[andris]

My PC is a stand alone unit basically dedicated to video work and only connected to the iNet occasionally.

[andris]

Hi Anton,

All my programs are on C drive.
How do I check what you are reffering to ?

I see in Device Manager / Properties / Device instance Id it starts with :

IDE\DISKWDC.....

Is this what you mean ?

[antonsvideo]

Hi Anton,

All my programs are on C drive.
How do I check what you are reffering to ?

I see in Device Manager / Properties / Device instance Id it starts with :

IDE\DISKWDC.....

Is this what you mean ?

make sure C drive primary channel is on UDMA5

http://www.videoproductions.com.au/edius4/IDE-Channel-UDMA5.gif

[andris]

Primaryy IDE Channel properties :

Device 0 : UDMA5
Device 1 : UDMA5

[andris]

I just run Norton System works and let it do it's thing.

It found 250 registry errors and "fixed" them

PCE only takes a few seconds now to load - slow start-up with PCE appears fixed.

This is curious though, in that during the week prior to the Defrag, I ran Norton and it came up with a handful of errors at that time which were "fixed" then. Because of this I didn't immediately think of using Norton again.

[antonsvideo]

Primaryy IDE Channel properties :

Device 0 : UDMA5
Device 1 : UDMA5

that is perfect, back to drawing board

how much Ram do you have and what is the min and max size of the swap file?

I always set min and max the same according to what is recommended

http://www.videoproductions.com.au/edius4/swap-file.gif

[andris]

Hi Anton,

Thanks for your efforts - see my last post - it's fixed.

But I wonder how much weird "damage" has been done by the Defrag procedure - problems lurking in the back ground ( eg changing my Excel font sizes ) still to come to light.

[T-Bone]

andris,

You probably do have problems lurking, but I think it highly unlikely that Defrag was the culprit in this case. I think Brandon's initial response to your initial post is what you should be on the lookout for: a disk error that Disk Check cleaned up.

Also, I would forget using Disk Cleanup and just regularly cleanout your Documents & Settings Temp folder.

BTW (more or less related to original post), can you tell Disk Check to save the report that it gives at the end somewhere - I can't read that fast? I've poked around and never been able to find that Disk Check automatically writes the report somewhere.