Sluggish Menus

[mayamaniac]

In my experience with the 350, the menu becomes slow usually after a long period of uninterrupted playback of any shows. This happens with the original stv and the malore stv I'm using. My work around now is to put Sage to sleep, and then wake it up again. The menus will become instantly responsive again after I do this. Once a while the menu does lock up the computer if I use skip forward repeatedly. I dont know the cause yet, maybe just buggy hauppauge drivers.

[Opus4]

I don't know if this applies in your situation, but a while back another user discovered that Norton AntiVirus was chewing up memory while scanning the mpg file during playback. After excluding the video dirs from auto-scan, menu responsiveness was improved. Just another thing to check.

- Andy

[mayamaniac]

I do have Symantec Anti-virus, But I remember this problem existed before I installed the anti-virus. But I'll exclude the recording folders from the Antivirus scanning anyway. I'll report back in a few days after testing to see if this is the problem or not. Thanks for the tip.

[RobDMB]

Just wanted to update that I disabled NAV on the folder where I record my Sagetv files to and it improved the responsiveness tremendously. The menus appear fairly quickly now and I'm about to use my computer for other things while using sagetv with the pvr 350 tv out.

[mls]

As a side note... NAV and McAfee have always tending to be somewhat of a system hog. You might be able to improve performance even more by unistalling NAV and trying Grisoft's free version of AVG.

I had gave up on those and changed to AVG several years ago simply because the others hogged the system so much I couldn't get other things done. If you feel a need for super overblown protection, then use NAV or McAffe, but if your setting up a dedicated machine for a PVR, you probably don't really need an antivirus program on it (just a good firewall), or go with AVG instead to reduce the CPU load.

I don't wish to lead you the wrong way though. All I can say is I have had very good luck with using Grisoft's free AVG. Or course, they do offer a more advanced version if you want to pay for (the main reason I don't like the others... having to always pay ever few months for updates).

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by mls

(the main reason I don't like the others... having to always pay ever few months for updates).

I can't resist this comment regarding price only... I still use NAV and always wait for a good sale w/rebates before upgrading to a new version. The last time I updated NAV, I ended up earning $20 because of the sale price + rebates. Don't ask me to explain the business sense of that sale. And, it wasn't a loss-leader for me, because that's all I bought that day. Strange!

- Andy

[mls]

Kewl, you lucked out on that deal eh. I've always had a weird feeling though about having to pay for an antivrus program. I mean, after all, if I hadn't already paid for a Microsoft OS that allowed all those viruses in the first place... I never felt I should have to pay for cleaning up the mess they made. Now if it was a Linux OS, well that might be a different story. Anyway, ya gotta have an antivir with Windows no matter what.

Sorry to be getting off topic, but gotta mention something about that rebate stuff too. Back when I was in that dead zone between not being able to work and having to prove it to get disability, a friend was funding all my computer goodies purchases and they all had rebates of course.

Somehow it turns out he was actually making a profit with me spending his money. After I did get disability pay so I could buy my own stuff, he ended up going broke. Now if only I can figure out how to get that idea working... spending money to get more money in return, hmm...

[mls]

Now, back on topic here...

In several of my posts scatter in the forum I have mentioned v2.1 being somewhat slower or sluggish compared to v2.0. I do hope people didn't take my comments as meaning there are massive slowdowns and pause like some people seem to be experiencing.

What I was referring to is that after using 2.0 for a long time and then changing to 2.1 there was a noticable, although small decrease in performance and slightly sluggish reaction time. Some people may not have noticed that slight difference at all.

I never worried about it because it was a new version and I figured as Jeff worked some of the bugs out of it he would also optimize the code a bit and things would return to normal in a future upgrade.

I should also mention it didn't help that the batteries in my remote were going dead also (which eventually did end up with some major sluggish behaviour). Since I have 3 Hauppauge remotes floating aroun here, it wasn't until I grabbed the one with the dead batteries until I found out how slow and sluggish and weird SageTV can become.

With a dying remote, press one button 3 or 4 times before anything happens, the pressing the next button goes right thru, then have to hit the next button 3 or 4 times again. If I tried doing any quick sequence of button pressed I never knew just exactly where I'd end or what would happen.

A dead set of batteries in a remote and SageTV makes one really interesting video came