PixelCheckSum Preforms Slowly On Aeros - Anyone Else?

[FlintBrenick]

Back when I was on XP I wrote a script that would play Minesweeper for you (just to see if I could do it). It worked great and was awesome to watch/show off (beating expert in 8 seconds ).

Now I'm on Vist Home Premium (SP2, x64) and I decided to look at my program last night. I noticed that it was going very, very slow. After looking into the problem deeper I found that it was the PixelCheckSum that was going slow. I use it to see what the status of each box is. So on a game like medium I have to scan 256, and at 8 pixels a box that's 2048 pixels. While the scan should take less than a second I found that in some cases it was taking up to 5 whole seconds!! I changed my computer's "Appearance Settings" from "Windows Aero" to "Windows Vista Basic" and everything went back to normal. The scans to place almost instantly.

I was thinking about reporting this as a bug, but I have reported a bug before and I didn't want to read though all the regulations for reporting. So instead I thought I'd see if anyone else has seen this kind of problem before or if it was just my computer.

[AdmiralAlkex]

This is not a bug, GDI is just NOT hardware-accelerated if Aero is on. This is why all GDI apps is slower on Vista/7. Although 7 does feature a limited acceleration, so it's not as slow as Vista, it could actually be slower too, depending on what you do.

It has been discussed before, on this forum and all over the internet, a simple search would have shown you that.

Now as far as a solution goes, I have 2 recommendations, either run the function DwmEnableComposition (example here) or right-click on the exe-file (or shortcut) leading to your script, press Properties, and check "Disable desktop composition" under the Compatibility tab.

Both ways will disable Aero until the process exit.

Edit: Better clarity (I hope)

Edited March 13, 2010 by AdmiralAlkex