Powerdirector 16 slow in general on a very fast PC

KellyfromFlorida

Newbie Joined: Jul 19, 2008 00:19 Messages: 29 Offline

Solved by

Oct 19, 2019 17:58

I'm running PowerDirector 16 with the latest patch on super fast desktop. Check out my dxDiag.

The problem is that the overall performance of the PowerDirector 16 (64-bit) app is slower on this PC than my little laptop with a weaker CPU.

For example, I have a new project and haven't imported any files in it yet. I click the sprocket for "Set User Preference" and it takes 5 to 10 seconds for the window to pop up. Then when I OK or cancel without even changing anything, it takes another 5 to 10 seconds. On my weaker CPU laptop running the same scenario takes less than a second.

Doing things like selecting video clips on the timeline takes a few seconds as opposed to being instant.

I'm wondering if I have a corrupt file somewhere? Maybe some hidden cache I need to clean? I've manually deleted all the temp files I could find.

This program shouldn't be so slow on my system. Any suggestions?

PS. I haven't always had this problem on this PC. I don't think it's a hardware issue since I haven't changed anything.

Filename	DxDiag.txt	Download
Description	DxDiag.txt
Filesize	86 Kbytes
Downloaded:	292 time(s)

optodata

Senior Contributor Location: California, USA Joined: Sep 16, 2011 16:04 Messages: 8630 Offline

Oct 19, 2019 18:25

Thanks for the DxDiag results. What stands out the most is that you've got a two-year-old video driver for your GTX 970, so the first thing I'd so is get the latest and greatest from nVidia.

You do have the latest PD16 patch (3424). I know this because it's listed as one of the last ten program crashes at the end of the report.

The sluggishness you describe sounds very much like your system is very busy doing other things while you're trying to use PD16. You can right-click on the Win10 taskbar and bring up Task Manager, then click on the Performance and Details tabs to get a sense of how much your system is working and whether or not PD is getting most of the attention.

You may also want to do the two steps listed in this post. OP there was having more serious issues, but was able to clear them up in part by doing the deep (but simple to run) diagnostics listed there.

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KellyfromFlorida

Newbie Joined: Jul 19, 2008 00:19 Messages: 29 Offline

Oct 19, 2019 20:42

Optodata -
Thanks so much for the quick reply. The good news is that my problem has been resolved. Here is what happened:

As I was checking things out on the PC trying to figure out what possibly could be causing the slowness I noticed that my anti-virus program was not running. I tried to start it and was given a message that it was expired. I tried to install the latest Norton which comes free with comcast and ran into problems because it couldn't delete the old version. I ended up in an online chat with Norton support to clean up a bunch of old Norton files and get the new anti-virus installed.

After all that, I did my test of starting Power Director and seeing how long it took to open the User Preferences. The window opened IMMEDIATELY!! I can now drag stuff around on the timeline without a delay. It now plays one video file to the next without a long pause. This is awesome!

All I can figure is something that was cleaned up in Norton was causing the problem. Whatever it was is now fixed. If it happens again, I'll be checking my antivirus software first.

Oh, I'll go ahead and make sure my video drivers are updated..

Thanks again for the reply.