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I have been a long time user of MailWasher, and liked its performance. For the past two weeks I have been using The new 2010 version. I finally uninstalled it and went back to the older version. Why??

To slow loading on my Windows XP machine.

When checking email to be deleted or labeled as spam, response is slow to display check mark.

When wanting to view the email, slow to display.

I like the new interface look, but overall the execution of software is to SLOW for me

Maybe I will try another release sometime in the future, when some tweaking has taken place.
But for now, back to the old.....

Stay tuned to this forum as things move quite fast, were up to v1.0.10 beta Speed is being looked at, recently wash speed was increased, but on my PC it is hard to tell as it is not the slowest of PCs.

Have you tried defragging your machine

When checking email to be deleted or labeled as spam, response is slow to display check mark.

When wanting to view the email, slow to display.

Both these hit the HDD for disk access, so it's just a thought that perhaps a defrag might be in order to speed it up.

rusticdog wrote:Have you tried defragging your machine

When checking email to be deleted or labeled as spam, response is slow to display check mark.

When wanting to view the email, slow to display.

Both these hit the HDD for disk access, so it's just a thought that perhaps a defrag might be in order to speed it up.

Yes, I defrag about once a week. This slowness does not occur in MW 6.5.4

Disk access is a part of the issue, defragging helps as would a faster hard drive. I'm seeing some impact from my stupid AV program scanning MW's files, excluding them can speed things up too and that is cheaper than a faster drive but not as much fun.

Ram is another sensitive spot, MW seems happy with XP and a Gig if you aren't running much else, if you are running a lot of other code and data is being pushed to the page file another stick of RAM could be handy. Most of the RAM use seems to go to the Microsoft .Net stuff but MW buffers a lot of data if there is space which improves speed. Lots of XP box RAM is coming available on places like ebay for not much money, new stuff works no better and costs a lot more.

The initial loading of MW is pretty slow on my system 20-30 seconds but restarting it is only 7-10 seconds. Spam processing speeds are a bit slower but given how much more checking is actually being done the slower rate is understandable.

No need to give up in any case, you can run v6 and 2010 at the same time, just run 2010 when you have the time and keep up with the updates (about weekly for now) and see if/when you feel it is time to switch over.

You keep saying that MW2010 is best with 1Gb of ram or more. Most computers running XP are now a few years old and virtually none of them will have this amount unless the owner has upgraded. My XP machine has 512Mb and is perfectly adequate for most things - except MW2010 of course...

Still lurking, happily using v6.54 which meets all my needs. I finally received the update email yesterday, and agree that it says nothing about the $10/year licence. But irrelevant for me as I won't be going that route, at least not until I upgrade the PC in a couple of years or so.

Sadly the way Microsoft built the .Net stuff anything using it tends to be memory hungry. It is only going to get worse as MS adds more and more to .Net and keeps working to force XP users to upgrade to new hardware and the latest Windows version.

davews wrote:You keep saying that MW2010 is best with 1Gb of ram or more. Most computers running XP are now a few years old and virtually none of them will have this amount unless the owner has upgraded. My XP machine has 512Mb and is perfectly adequate for most things - except MW2010 of course...

Still lurking, happily using v6.54 which meets all my needs. I finally received the update email yesterday, and agree that it says nothing about the $10/year licence. But irrelevant for me as I won't be going that route, at least not until I upgrade the PC in a couple of years or so.

I opened up my nearly 5 year old DT (XP) and dropped in (4) 1 GB sticks for which XP will only use 3.2+ but I was totally amazed at how much faster and better everything runs. Where you really get the biggest boost is eliminating the thrashing back and forth to the disk for the pagefile. Well worth the $ spent.

Sidewinder wrote:

davews wrote:You keep saying that MW2010 is best with 1Gb of ram or more. Most computers running XP are now a few years old and virtually none of them will have this amount unless the owner has upgraded. My XP machine has 512Mb and is perfectly adequate for most things - except MW2010 of course...

Still lurking, happily using v6.54 which meets all my needs. I finally received the update email yesterday, and agree that it says nothing about the $10/year licence. But irrelevant for me as I won't be going that route, at least not until I upgrade the PC in a couple of years or so.

I opened up my nearly 5 year old DT (XP) and dropped in (4) 1 GB sticks for which XP will only use 3.2+ but I was totally amazed at how much faster and better everything runs. Where you really get the biggest boost is eliminating the thrashing back and forth to the disk for the pagefile. Well worth the $ spent.

I guess I am the stupid one in this thread... If someone release a new piece of software (MW 2010) and it is a resource hog, then I am suppose to go out and buy more memory??? If MW 6.xx.xx was not a resource hog, then maybe the developers of MW 2010 should look and see why MW 6 is faster than MW 2010.

Jayhawk wrote:I guess I am the stupid one in this thread... If someone release a new piece of software (MW 2010) and it is a resource hog, then I am suppose to go out and buy more memory??? If MW 6.xx.xx was not a resource hog, then maybe the developers of MW 2010 should look and see why MW 6 is faster than MW 2010.

Quite the contrary, certainly didn't mean to imply anything. What I was trying to point out was that you can get a huge improvement in your system performance for the next two years. The suggestion had nothing to do with MWP.

stan_qaz wrote:Sadly the way Microsoft built the .Net stuff anything using it tends to be memory hungry. It is only going to get worse as MS adds more and more to .Net and keeps working to force XP users to upgrade to new hardware and the latest Windows version.

That's an interesting quote. What do you base that on?

What "way" did MS build the ".Net stuff" that makes it memory hungry - and how would you improve it??

I am a .net C# coder and most well coded "stuff" is very quick and well behaved.

This is not a personal attack, but I am professionally and honestly interested in reading your reply.

Well I guess you could tell Microsoft the same thing, I doubt if Vista 7 would run on my XP box that does a decent job with XP on it once I bumped up the memory a bit.

They know why 2010 runs slower than v6.

First it is doing a lot more spam processing than v6 did which is becoming necessary as spammers add features and tricks to their spam to defeat the more simplistic (like v6) anti-spam programs.

Second they switched development to .Net that brings along a lot of overhead but makes programming a good bit easier and gives access to more Windows functions and features. Keeping their old development toolset just wasn't an option, it had limited support and offered none of the functions users have been asking for in MW for several years like resizable fonts and graphics.

Third it is still in the early development stage and there are lots of calls to the logging system and some amount of code to assist in tracking issues. They have also spent little time on fully optimizing the code since that would give little long term improvement until the development works out all the glitches the new users are finding. Don't misconstrue that as they have spent no time optimizing the methods MW is using to do things which they have been doing as can be seen by the filtering system running many times faster in recent versions than it did just a few months ago.


I'm probably one of the biggest aggravations they face over speed issues! I keep a stopwatch beside my computer and bitch about every little thing that isn't darned near instant. Rusticdog just loves (no he doesn't) getting my 3-4 MB of logs when I've just finished a stack of over 10,000 messages and have an issue with speed dropping after the first 7,000 have run through or complaints about slow filter re-checking after a filter edit with 10,000 messages in the grid. Boot time, restart time, message selection change after 5,000 messages have been washed, deleting 2000 messages and probably 50 other issues all make them hesitate to click on my posts or open my e-mails. They still do and even better they have done wonders in improving things and have great hopes to do more, I figure about half hoping to get me off their back and half to make everyone else happy.


Stick in a 1 GB memory stick for around $20 on ebay or $35 from newegg.com and you'll be a lot happier. Ask around you might even find a buddy with a few DIMMs stuck in their junk drawer that they will be happy to find a home for. I'd offer you one but I recently cleaned out my older spares by giving them to friends and neighbors for free and with a computer cleaning and free install tossed in.

If not just stay with v6 until you get around to a better computer, that is what mom is doing since her old XP laptop has too many issues aside from RAM to be worth upgrading.

nobodyspecial wrote:

stan_qaz wrote:Sadly the way Microsoft built the .Net stuff anything using it tends to be memory hungry. It is only going to get worse as MS adds more and more to .Net and keeps working to force XP users to upgrade to new hardware and the latest Windows version.

That's an interesting quote. What do you base that on?

What "way" did MS build the ".Net stuff" that makes it memory hungry - and how would you improve it??

I am a .net C# coder and most well coded "stuff" is very quick and well behaved.

This is not a personal attack, but I am professionally and honestly interested in reading your reply.

I used to be a Windows coder myself, ever so happy to retire and get away from all the Windows issues! I did more in straight C than C# but had to dink with it my last year or so.

I don't have any handy links to point you to on this but if you compare most native applications to a similar .Net application along with the DLLs and other .Net overhead that gets loaded (even once you get past the misleading numbers in task manager) most folks will see the native application using a lot less in the way of memory. You see the same type of memory reduction as you drop to lower and lower levels of programming until you are working in assembler with near zero overhead.

Now I'm not saying that the memory use is a bad thing, in most situations running on newer MS operating systems and computers that are above the minimum requirement that extra memory use is paid back by shorter development times, faster execution,more features and if several .Net applications are run a lower total memory use due to the shared code in the .Net modules.

Trying to duplicate the functions that .Net provides the programmer adds a lot to the program development time and requires a much more skilled programmer to do the coding. I feel pretty sure that .Net is the future for Windows development, Microsoft has just put too much effort into it to allow it to fail, you saw the same thing a few years back with Visual C, it was just so much less programming effort to do it the MS way that unless you had a huge pile of legacy code it didn't make sense to not use the available modules.

I'd never tackle a project like improving .Net, I don't begin to know how many thousands of man-years have gone into getting it where it is today. On the other hand the folks coding the .Net stuff are targeting recent computers with later versions of Windows, that is where they make money, not in spending a lot of time supporting an operating system (XP) that they have been trying to kill off for several years now.

Improving a .Net project is another matter, Google will keep you busy for days if you start reading what it comes back with in the way of .Net optimizations for different situations. Your local book store likely has shelves of books on the same topics.

Personally I learned the hard way to ignore all that in the early stages of optimization and focus on beating on the program for bugs, glitches and corner cases and in the case of something like MW all the different types and configurations of mail servers that it has to deal with. That would include things like fixing my having picked the wrong algorithm or data structure for something impacting performance. Once I had the bugs squashed, or while squashing them if I had the staff/time I'd concentrate on getting a complete set of features into the program. Once stable and complete I'd go back and look at optimization of the actual code, with a stable starting point you can usually narrow the hot-spots that burn CPU cycles or use RAM to something manageable to concentrate on. They might even find that they could alter some of the internal settings of the program in low memory or slow CPU situations in an automated manner to give the users in these situations the best possible user experience.

Complaints about software upgrades being slow are as common as .... software upgrades.

.NET is not 'the' problem. It's a tool that is being used increasingly for software development and, for the most part, results in faster / better / safer / less 'buggy' programs. Until something better comes along ... we will continue to see more software based on .Net code.

Legacy systems (old systems - low specs) might as well include lots of low end notebooks and netbooks (those teensy computers that are good for browsing but not much else). VISTA is a total dog of an operating system (OS), S L OW (even on high end systems) and best never spoken about in polite company.

Game development used to push hardware development to the max. Software piracy killed off lots of PC game development which is now oriented to consoles (PS3, WII and the MS thing). My current system is OLD (by my standards) but does everything I need at a speed I am happy with: Intel Core 2 DUO (E6850) @ 3 gig hz, 4 gig of RAM (GEIL - nothing especially fast), Geforce 8800 GTS. It's about 5 years old (whenever the intel chip came out). Hardrives (multiple) - all western digital SATA - some eSATA and some USB connected drives. Good motherboard (MOBO) - Gigabyte.

The single biggest 'good thing' that has happened for PC's in the last few years was the release of Windows 7. It's just excellent, fault tolerant and works. I got the 64 bit pro version as soon as it was released and could not be happier.

Google has plenty of hits showing how to improve system performance - and most are dodgy. IMHO, nothing quite does the job of speeding up a system as a complete reinstall of the operating system. It can be a pain but then the payoff if enormous.

Earlier versions of Norton were real resource hogs - and lots of people still use them. By comparison, Norton Internet Security 2010 has a minimal performance impact. Others, like McAfee and Zonelabs - well, I guess they are better than nothing but they cause major performance hits. Many people might not realise that lots of programs will not show in taskmanager - especially malware. Also, lots of common programs (like iTunes, HEAPS of MS stuff [including documented cases where their anti-priracy code goes feral, Adobe, JAVA, anything from Apple and everything from Logitech) like to 'phone home' regularly and cumulatively these can really impose a big performance hit which becomes more obvious when you upgrade an old faithful (like MWP). Since MWP (or insert upgraded program name) was the last one installed, it gets blamed for the sins of all - sometimes quite unfairly.

It's difficult to advise anyone about what's best for them (in terms of PC systems) without knowing what they want to do with it and budget constraints. If all you want to do is browse the web and check webmail - then you don't need much (must have a good AV product though). Once you move towards playing PC games then your system specs go up as far as your wallet can afford.

General suggestions

• Schedule regular clean reinstalls of your operating system and software - it's a pain but well worth the instant performance bonus.
  If possible, upgrade your motherboard BIOS - get help because you can kill a perfectly working system if done incorrectly. Often results in good performance improvements.
  AVOID software that 'fixes' your system registry - promise lots and tend to cause more problems.
  NEVER EVER be tempted to use any pirated software from any source. Morality aside, most are laced with hidden malware and you might end up being one of the millions of PC's being used by crooks for their kiddy porn servers without ever knowing. Common cause of slowing systems - malware.
  If you can, upgrade to WIN 7 - there is an online MS advisor tool that will let you know if it's worth the hassle.
  32 bit software (most MS operating systems) can't access memory addresses past 3 or so gigs - but it's a pretty cheap
  There are some free tools available from Sourceforge which show you really what is actually running and how much each process is using in terms of resources. Some of these MIGHT be malware. Google whatever process is unfamiliar to you and you should get sound advice about whether or not it's safe and or safe to turn off.
  Services - take too long to explain this in detail - but for the most part the average user doesn't really need much. Google will point you to ways to SAFELY turn these off.
  Browse safely. Use Firefox over IE because it has far better protection - even compared to IE8. These days all you need do is touch on a dodgy site and your system will get infected faster than you can blink. Lots of us visit porn sites (go on - admit it ). These are laced with really very nasty malware. If you do visit porn sites, wear protection - max system security which will cost $$'s. Why can't crooks stick with the good old days of email distributed viruses? sigh"
  Dating sites (all of them) are a feeding ground for lads (internet crooks). Very few people on these sites are 'real' - and the site owners don't care because they make lots of money. That gorgeous woman is almost certainly a man (part of an organised gang) working in an internet cafe in Africa. NEVER accept any photos / files / anything from them via chat software - most are malware - and it's kinda weird thinking you are 'talking' to a woman when it's a sweaty dude

Finally, we live in the real world. If you cannot afford to upgrade your PC then maybe you can install multiple copies of your operating system - I have several. You could set aside one for everyday email use (with AV and other security) but not much else ... it' can be a pain to set up but not at all hard to do. Google has loads of walkthrough explanations. Like everyone, I have to live within my means (small means BTW) but if I can't afford decent security then I can't afford to use the internet.

Generally speaking, early software versions are rarely faster than the second to last one. Each time a line of code changes there is a risk it might break something but unless people report issues like speed concerns etc, then developers might never know. Coders develop software that must work on millions of different software environments - and despite best efforts, it might not be possible to support increasingly older systems / technology.

So please be patient and before you give up on the new MWP, try out some of my suggestions (most don't cost anything) - and be patient. But do get back about your experience from time to time so that we know how things are going.

Good luck!

HTH

Mike

I am baffled with al the huge memory usages being quoted for on XP. What on earth do you chaps do with your computers? Under normal circumstances my page file never gets used. I have just checked from task manager and I normally use about 250Mb of my 512Mb ram. Page file itself (pagefile.sys) is written to when I boot my compute in the morning and normally never gets written to again during the day according to the file properties. OK, I don't use fancy video or other multi-media and my usage is modest, but fitting more ram to my machine won't make any difference. Unless I wanted to use MW2010 I guess...