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I'm running Visual Studio 2008 (Team System edition) on Windows 7 x86. This is a clean install of the OS, and clean install of VS, including SP1.

I don't know if anyone has experienced this. The editor (not designers or anything else, just the text editor) is extremely unusable. By that I mean that editing text is a sort of herky-jerky experience where it seems there are certain actions that cause lag. Ctrl+Backspace for example, noticeable lag. Scrolling up or down a source file with the arrow keys also seems to lag.

It's difficult to explain this "lag". It feels like the editor isn't keeping up with my typing speed.

I've run VS2008 on Windows XP and Server 2003 (as a desktop) without this problem. On those the editor is as snappy as TextPad or any other, simpler editing application.

Also on this same machine VS2010 does not exhibit the behavior. The editor works fine.

In fact, the problem reminds me of the horrible performance of the VS2005 editor, which I had to stop using because it was unbearable. Most of my initial .NET 2.0 experience was obtained by using vim and a NAnt file, actually, until I upgraded to VS2008.

This is what I've tried so far, without success:

  • Turn off change tracking.
  • Turn off delimiter highlighting (1)
  • Turn off as much screen candy as possible (line numbers, selection margin, etc)
  • Turn off the navigation bar (this was one of the recommended actions to fix VS2005).
  • Turn off "Underline errors in the editor" and "Show live semantic errors"
  • Turn off automatic formatting.

(1) Is this a bug in VS? I turned it off and it continues to highlight braces!?

I even installed a hotfix dated from March 2008 that supposedly fixed a problem with the HTML source editor that I never installed anywhere else before, but that didn't have any effect either.

From the OS perspective I've tried turning off all animations, effects, themes and eye candy. Also to no avail. An interesting thing though, when running Win7 without themes the treeview in the solution explorer tends to flash uncontrollably when it gains or loses the focus. With eye candy turned on it stops flashing.

The problem occurs in any type of project, with any number of files open or closed. It also happens with Intellisense turned off; however once I turn off Intellisense there isn't much point to using VS, so I'd like to keep it. But in any case it has no effect.

Finally my question: Has anyone run into this problem? And if so, is it fixable? Does anyone know if MS is planning another VS2008 service pack to fix Win7 problems or something like that?

I write text 8-10 hours a day on this thing and I can't deal with these problems. I don't care about fancy designers and thingamajigs but at the very least I need the editor to perform reasonably.

(Note: To head off one line of reasoning here, I can't upgrade this project to VS2010 yet. Maybe in a few months but not now. So I need VS2008 to work now).

Update This is C#, by the way. I haven't tried C++ or VB. I also tried switching fonts from ProggyClean (my fav) to Consolas to Courier New and back, no effect. Another thing: A symptom seems to be excessive flashing of the caret, especially when hitting Enter. It's like blink-blink-blink--blinkblinkblinkblink-blink-blink. If that makes sense.

kprobst
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    Can you associate the lagginess moments with high CPU use or high disk usage? – CyberDude Mar 11 '11 at 21:20
  • @CyberDude - No, not at all. This happens when the rest of the system is basically idle. – kprobst Mar 11 '11 at 21:26
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    I use it with no problems on Vista. Maybe try to run it in compatibility mode set to Vista? – CyberDude Mar 11 '11 at 21:31
  • @CyberDude now that I have not tried, it didn't occur to me. I'll give it a go tonight when I get home. Thanks! – kprobst Mar 11 '11 at 21:32
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    Also this may be of help: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/bc778e26-9156-4924-a9ca-a57ef8ff6bcc/ – CyberDude Mar 11 '11 at 21:35
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    Do other apps work fine, wrt drawing and user input? Maybe you have a bad driver or hardware. You don't have any fancy desktop stuff installed, like for example, nVidia's nView Desktop Manager? That will slow down your entire system, due to its windows hooks. – Chris O Mar 11 '11 at 21:37
  • @Chris yes, everything works fine. I have the latest NVidia drivers here. To be honest this is an older box (dual Xeon, 2GB RAM) but VS worked fine under Server 2003. I don't expect it to be faster, but at least not slower. – kprobst Mar 13 '11 at 19:27

3 Answers3

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I am also experiencing this, and it's got me totally frustrated. I can click in the text of any file, try to type, not even my cursor appears for a second or two (or sometimes 4 or 5), then some or all of my typing appears. If I then click on another line, nothing changes for up to five seconds. If I go to the left and try to click and drag to select several lines, nothing happens for this lag time, then the cursor appears at the first line (the one I clicked on first, which might be the lowest line if I selected upwards), with nothing selected. Same thing for other click-and-drag-to-select, like part of a variable name, or even double-click to select the entire variable name -- after the lag, the cursor blinks from where I initially clicked, with nothing selected.

My machine is pretty good, including 16GB of ram and i7 processor, nVidia graphics -- it's NOT the hardware.

Any luck with an answer?

jenisysJohn
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  • I was never able to figure out a solution, but I've moved on to VS 2010 and faster machines so it ceased to be a problem. I'm thinking this was something in my install rather than something endemic to Visual Studio. – kprobst Sep 27 '12 at 21:54
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You mentioned this was a clean install of the OS. Do you have all the proper drivers installed? I could see some of these problems coming from using default drivers, or by not having all the drivers installed. The cursor thing, for example, makes me think video drivers.

Also, check what versions of the .NET framework you have installed, and compare that against your XP machine. Does the XP machine have both .NET 3.5sp1 and .NET 4.0, but the Win7 machine only have .NET 4.0? Try installing 3.5 explicitly and see if that helps.

David Yaw
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It seems nothing worked, so I'm going to have to live with this. Thanks for all the comments.

kprobst
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  • Can you try a different video board, perhaps from a different vendor? Don't give up! This must be a hardware problem, at our work we have been running VS2010 on lots of older machines. The editor does lag somewhat, but nothing like what you are mentioning. – Chris O Mar 17 '11 at 12:26
  • I dunno man, upgrading my video card to run an IDE... not something I'm willing to do at this point. – kprobst Mar 18 '11 at 02:06