Beyond The Yellow Bubble

 Oh what a difference 24 hours can make.  Yesterday, like many of you, I downloaded and installed the 8.5.1 Gold code.  I am not sure what the issue was with Passport Advantage entitlements!  The unistall (8.5.1 beta) took 45 minutes and the install a mere 20 minutes.  Notes must still be the slowest software product of all time to install!
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Having been a beta particpant I knew all the soft spots I had found during the beta program and so I wanted to verify these had all been addressed because they had been driving me nuts.  Ever since moving to 8.5.0 I have had no end of problems the moment I start DDE.  And I was finding 8.5.1 Gold was no different:-

1. A soon as Designer started to load I would get screen flickers for no apparent reason on one or both clients (I have 3 monitors)
2. At times the Notes and Designer client would go blank for 2-3 seconds
3. If I launched Designer (eclipse) help it would jump behind the Designer window and refuse to come out unless I moved it to another monitor
4. When I ran LS code via the LS debugger the Debugger window would also disappear behind the designer window.  I could switch to the window but then it jumped behind again when I stepped over the next line of code.
5. The LS debugger was taking 5-10 seconds to execute every line of code making a debug session take forever.
6. After a while (20mins to 1hr) I would get eclipse pop up windows appearing in an endless cycle causing both clients to lock up and I would have to restart my computer.
7. A few minutes after loading Quicken my Notes/Designer windows starting to flash endlessly until I closed Quicken.

The bottom line was I was devastated.  I decided to do another install the next day (today) before I vented and potentially rained on Ed's parade.  I was puzzled that everyone else seemed to be having pleasant experiences with their new toy so maybe it was just me....
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The second install on a laptop with Vista was a completely different story.  It was not lightening fast (what ever is with Vista) - but it was much better.  So I went back to my original workstation and tried to identify something in my environment that might be leading to some of these problems.  Sure enough it turned out that by disabling my NVIDIA graphic card's nView Desktop Manager I was suddenly unable to reproduce ANY of the above problems.  One small change to my configuration was the difference between 8.5.1 being a complete disaster and what I am now seeing.  What I am now seeing is all the great new features covered so well by so many people this past week, but I am now seeing it in a pretty snappy and stable environment.   I cannot describe how thrilled I am to finally have a version of 8.X that is not dogged by both performance and stability issues.  OK, so DDE is still not as fast as Notes 6.0 Designer but then I didn't have a powerful LotusScript Editor that more than compensates my time.  8.5.1 Designer is free and this latest release represents the future of Lotus Notes development .  So if you are still sitting on the fence I suggest now may be the time to get your hands dirty. The is not just the best thing since sliced bread, it is actually better than sliced bread.... 
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Oh, and if you are finding issues check out your software configuration as a few small tweaks may make a world of difference.