Windows 7 + keyclone -> WoW windows crashing, and keyclone stops responding.

[Bufe]

Installed Windows7 yesterday, because i had been using WinXP up untill then, and also had Vista64 which was shit....

So i install Windows7 to improve my performance, and benefit from the 4GB i have.

In single window mode e.g fullscreen i have no problem with WoW. Runs sweet.
I am using the latest catalyst suite for Windows7.

When i start up my 5x windows with keyclone it all works very well up untill the point where i use PIP more than
3-4-5 times. Then Keyclone stops responding totally. And quite often after about 2 minutes. 1 or 2 of the wow
windows brought up by keyclone crashes.

I did a stresstest where i logged in, at a graveyard..and started spamming my PIP buttons.
All worked fine for about 7 clicks..then there was a lag. and then when the lag was gone. Keyclone did not work anymore.
Had to shut down all windows and manually close keyclone from the Task manager -> processes.

Anyone have similar problems with keyclone?

I am also seeing very low performance when running wow in 5x windows compared to WinXP. But this
might be due to immature video drivers.

Bufe 8| ?(

[Poetry]

We had the same problem with PiP and Keyclone with Windows 7 64. Another problem (not related to Keyclone I don't think) was that the main window would stop responding occasionally (only at really inconvenient times of course). Only ever the main window and incidentally almost always on Patchwerk! Unlike you, though, we found a huge performance increase with Windows 7 in general. However the PiP problem and the lockup problem forced us to abandon the experiment and move back to Vista 64.

[Bufe]

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately i found Vista64 bit to be impossible to use. 5 windows ran better on my XP.
And with 5 windows up in Vista64 bit, when it had 4GB ram to play with, i sat with the same ammount of ram used with 5 windows in WinXP.
So the gain of memory was poor, and there was no speed increase since Vista used disk swapping way to much.

Windows7 is very good at memory handling from what i have seen so far.
Out of 5windows up on Windows7, i have 900MB avail physical memory.

With WinXP and Vista64 I had like 50mb free, and 1500MB of page memory used for all 5 windows combined.

Hope there will be a fix to the PIP problem fast, as i really like to use Windows7 for its memory handling.

Bufe

[Starbuck_Jones]

Did you only have this problem useing keyclones maximizer on windows 7? Im about to go to windows 7 x64 here soon and want to do all 5 accounts on one box.

[Bufe]

yes. Only Win7.
Although slow on Vista64....it was stable.
But i had the best performance on WinXP, even though it used only 3gig of my 4gig memory.

So unless you have like more than 4gig memory, I, personally, would not recommend Vista64.
It might be pretty ok if you have shitloads of memory, but for me it was giving rather poor performance.

i have Athlon AM2 6000+ cpu, and 4gig OCZ 800MHZ DDR2 memory, and 2x 3870 in crossfire.
If you want to compare system. Running all boxed windows on a 24" LCD monitor.

In Win7's defence. When it comes to performance, nothing beats it if you want to run 1 fullscreen window.
It's memory handling is sweet.

[moosejaw]

It is written all over these forums that 5 boxing with Vista requires the 64 bit version and minimum of 6 gb of ram. Please don't say Vista 64 is shit when you don't have the hardware to run 5 properly.

[Bufe]

for an operating system to demand 6GB of memory, when an older one do just fine with 3GB running the same software, well...thats shit in my book
If you dont have anything to say, relative to the subject in the first post. Please don't post under this thread.

[keyclone]

memory requirements (all numbers are rough, obviously):

OS - xp(500M) vista64(750M)
wow - 500M per instance

5x wow + vista64 == 2.5G + 750M == 3.25G

keep in mind, to avoid memory thrashing you need to be BELOW 80% memory usage. therefore:

M * 0.80 = 3.25
M == 4.06 G

so, you need at LEAST 4G of memory to run without thrashing while 5 boxing. keep in mind, as you move around the wow world, each wow instance increases its memory usage (a little, they have definitely improved on this). also, if you have a browser open, maybe winamp and an IM client, you'd want even more memory.

6G on vista64 would be a very nice fit (i'm running with 8G on my vista64 quad core at the moment)

as for issues with win7 ... i haven't loaded it on any machines yet.

drop me a PM with your email address and i'll check to see if there are any issues.

[Bufe]

have posted you a PM..:) :thumbup:

[Svpernova09]

Windows 7 = Beta.

Seriously - Do not bitch about problems on a Beta OS unless they are specifically related to the OS and you are bitching to the Developer (That would be Microsoft).This. Windows 7 is very stable, but remember it is Beta.

[Rin]

I'm running Windows 7 64 and Keyclone here. No lag, no dropping of clients, no issues at all...

EDIT: Nvm, I see that you're having issues with the PiP swapping. I haven't tried that yet...

System specs:

intel i7 920, 60 GB SSD (WoW) drive, 1.5TB Seagate, 1x GTX OC 280, eVGA mobo (3-way SLI), 6 GBs DDR 3 10k dominator RAM (may upgrade to 12 GBs if I go back to 10-boxing), Windows 7 x64 dual-monitors.

[Bufe]

Half the meaning with this post was to "encourage" the developer to maybe start working on a Windows7 version.
And as said, Windows7 in itself is very stable, but the Keyclone application PIP function is not working well with it.

If there was a beta-version of keyclone available for Windows7, it would be easier to "launch" the Final version
since the beta of Keyclone would have been in testing for a while.

Just saying this, because compared to Vista, Windows7 ownz it right down, and I for one believe that alot of
people will change suddenly to Windows7 when its launched, and i can only imagine the hell SolidIce then
would have to go trough if everyone experienced the problems i have experienced now.

Hence, i see no reason for the super moderators of this forum to become snappy, for me trying to
help the author be a bit ahead of the change to come. The problems i am facing is not in direct
relation to Windows7, but rather Keyclone not being 100% compatible with Windows7.
So i belive this to not be a problem with Windows7 itself...

I love Keyclone, and i am very pleased by the support of the developer so far, and i only wanna help.
- Both myself, and others who might wanna change to Windows7 as fast as possible.

I have been in contact with author now, and hence, i will no longer write any replies to this post, but rather
do it in PM's with the author.

Bufe.

[Svpernova09]

Half the meaning with this post was to "encourage" the developer to maybe start working on a Windows7 version.
And as said, Windows7 in itself is very stable, but the Keyclone application PIP function is not working well with it.

*snip*
Why would you want a dev to work on a Beta OS? I'd MUCH rather the Dev be working on something much more productive Environments (WinXP/Vista / 32/64) or adding new features / bug fixes.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Yesterday I got windows 7 installed, wow, keyclone and symlinked the folders bla bla bla. The PiP does fail after about 5 swaps at what point keyclone would not broadcast to the clients. Another thing I noticed was that if you didnt use the PiP it would still fail to work. This is a bit more complicated, but I noticed that when you move your mouse to a slave box the app will bring that window to the forground or active window. After a few passes, this no longer occured so you had to click in that window first to make it the active window before you could interact with the enviroment. Once it quit automaticaly on mouse move active window, the PiP swapping would not work either, however the broadcasting seemed to still work fine.

I havent used PiP before as I was useing 3 machines to box on but now with this setup I can 5 box on one PC, Even Dalaran is ok at about 30fps on all five clients. But it is inconvienent that it doesnt work.

[keyclone]

noted and on the list.

now all i need is a win7 dev box...

[railz]

I run 12Gb on Vista 64 with an i7 920 and so far haven't had any swapping issues. However I don't use keyclone so I have no idea on stability.

[Poetry]

noted and on the list.

now all i need is a win7 dev box...

And it looks like you can't download it anymore from Microsoft unless you have MSDN access. Although it seems you can still get license keys.

[lognoronon]

Having the same issues as well on windows 7 64. As for the folks bitching about others bringing it up....it's coming out later this year and it would be good for the devs to be aware of it and have it working ok since a lot of folks will be switching to it on release. Why people would not want it working is beyond me /boggle. Windows 7 is far better than vista even in beta form and I for one as well as a lot of others will be picking it up when it gets released.

[railz]

As will I, although I won't be switching right away. As with Apple, I've learnt over many many years never to buy a first generation Microsoft product. I'll give it six months to mature and then pick it up.

[Moorea]

bufe's post are very reasonable and nice and useful; and yes the moderation/comments has become "interesting" lately - truth is keyclone has been stale since June 08 and it'd be nice indeed to have new releases and betas - personally I switched to HKN until PiP and other long standing issues get resolved.

[Vecter]

Running Windows 7 64bit myself with 6gb of ram. Using Keyclone with 3 clients and maximizer. If I do not swap I have no problems. If I swap with 1 of the other clients I tend to not have any problems (pretty rare.) However once I start swapping with that 3rd client things tend to go downhill and I will lose mouse active window and Keyclone broadcasting. At first it was pretty inconvenient as I would shutdown all clients and keyclone and restart. However I soon realized I could just restart keyclone, manually add the 3 clients and set each maximizers position and be running full speed in about 30 seconds. Not bad (unless I lose that connection in a tough spot :) )

[D3K17]

Having the same problem here, I do not swap at all. I found windows 7 to be much more faster than any other OS when multiboxing with wow. I can get a good 12 or 20 minutes work of playtime with keyclone working, then boom the window disappears and the only way to remedy it is to quit all the wow clients, search for keyclone in the processes and quit it.

What is interesting though is, I 4 boxed on my macbook pro using it (4GB ram, 2.4 C2D, Windows 7 build 7000) and I never ran into any issues of this sort, so obviously I am doing something a bit different on my desktop.

Specs: Mac Pro Nahelem, 12 GB memory, 2x 2.93 Octad, Radeon HD 4870 X2 + Radeon HD 4870 Mac Edition running windows 7 build 7000 beta.

I am going to fiddle with some options to see if I can get it working stable again.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Windows 7 is just about to get the boot from my box. Its perdy, but there are so many little things that just keep going wrong. The Keyclone thing is one of them. I played last night just fine. Logged off, but left the wow login windows up, came down the next day and I couldnt get keyclone to do more than one keystroke push and it would quit working. Restarted it, rebooted, nothing. Ran it as administrator and it worked fine, Why it quit working when I just walked away from it last night is beyond me. Why I had to run it as an admin when I didnt before is beyond me.

Synergy isnt working right either for me. It was fine, then for no reason that I can find it started to do the super spinny thing on the host box. Normaly it only does that on client boxes if you dont lock the mouse. I have no fix for this problem yet or why just out of the blue it started to do it. But this is unacceptable with my setup and is a real deal breaker.

I cant get the screen saver to reliably work. most of the time it flat out wont kick on and when it does, any kind of hickup aborts it like the windows system messages that tell you dont have defender turned on even though ive told it a half dozen times not to notify me. I have a special case setup where I cant turn off the main monitor so I rely on he screen saver to not burn the windows desktop into it.

Twice now after reboots its uninsalled and reverted the Nvidia driver from the beta to the windows native driver.

So when I get back from my long weekend on thursday, im going to give it a few more trys, but I already downloaded vista 64 off of msdn. I would prefer to use xp64, but msdn doesnt have a 64bit version with service packs slipstreamed in and I need at least sp2 for the raid driver to work as its not available for download after it was intergrated into the OS. kinda like USB 2.0 drivers were.

[keyclone]

on vista, always run keyclone (and vent) as administrator.

[confusedtx5]

So when I get back from my long weekend on thursday, im going to give it a few more trys, but I already downloaded vista 64 off of msdn. I would prefer to use xp64, but msdn doesnt have a 64bit version with service packs slipstreamed in and I need at least sp2 for the raid driver to work as its not available for download after it was intergrated into the OS. kinda like USB 2.0 drivers were.You can get a free program called nLite which you can use to slipstream the service packs onto an install disc yourself (or the individual raid driver). And do cool things like add in the cd key and if you do it correctly, you can setup the install so you can start it and walk away, come back in an hour and its done. I had the same problems myself, but my raid drivers could only be manually added with nLite. fyi, the Vista version is called vLite.

[Simulacra]

on vista, always run keyclone (and vent) as administrator.

have I told you lately that I love you ? ;)

Just inatlled windows 7 build 7100 from using xp and of course had no idea what the hell this OS is all about - I wondered WTF is going on - thx KC

[Otlecs]

for an operating system to demand 6GB of memory, when an older one do just fine with 3GB running the same software, well...thats shit in my book
You need a new book. Really.

Adding more features to an OS doesn't usually make it demand less memory.

With memory being as cheap as it is these days, coding for minimal memory usage tends to take a distant second place to coding for high performance which can include things such as avoiding alignment faults by deliberately "wasting" memory.

On-topic though, this discussion - and the comments from both solidly encamped sides of the discussion - reminds me of a similar discussion here a long, long time ago when I was looking for Vista support, although I didn't even manage to secure a "on the list" before I dived in and had a go with it in any case ;)

It's good to know that there are actually problems with KC and Windows 7 though - I'll be sure to keep that off my multibox machines until they're resolved.

Thanks for the heads-up.