Hi.
Having recently upgraded from a '4GB Sandisk Cruzer' thumb drive to an '8GB PNY Attache Optima' thumb drive I had hoped to see my PortableApps experience increase in usefulness threefold.
Precise expectations I know, but the read and write speeds of the new drive were around three times better than the old one. Unfortunately this simply isn't the case. Infact, the newer more capable drive has actually made PortableApps worse somehow.
It would appear that before loading the interface PAM scours the entire drive for content. This is the only way I can explain why it sits there in the tray, unresponsive and for all I know doing nothing for so much longer.
May I suggest that PAM only ever loads the first 20 items prior to the display of the menu, and loads every subsequent 'page' of content after this initial boot. In this way I can start to work with my portable apps and folders and if needs be wait longer for the rest of the apps to appear in the menu should they be needed.
So doing would I hope make PAM load super-fast regardless of the capaciousness of your particular storage medium.
Alternatively, have PAM keep a history of what apps are currently available instead of refreshing itself every time I plug in the drive. (Which is a complete ball ache on old USB 1.0 machines by the way.) Manually refreshing the list takes all of two clicks anyway.
Thanks for the continued development of what has become an essential toolkit for me, and I hope that my feedback proves of some use to somebody. Despite these grievances I do infact love the platform and its functionalities.
Thanks for your time. Included is a screenshot of my 1.1 modification of an existing XP theme that I found floating around in these forums. If anyone's interested in it I don't mind sharing.
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Once the autorun menu comes up and you choose to start the PortableApps.com Platform, it scans the directories within your PortableApps directory for applications and then gets the icons and names from them for the menu. This can take a few moments. The next release has some features that speed this process.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks for the quick response, it's appreciated, however this still doesn't explain how a drive double the size and thrice the speed is slower to load the exact same amount of apps. (I simply cloned the old drive onto the new one.)
I've even gone so far as to try and tweak/compress the three graphics the menu uses to see if lesser file sizes helps (even though the originals are feather light to begin with) and also troubleshot(?) whether or not one of my 'unofficial' portable apps is slowing the boot process, but since all I can see PAM doing is looking for the .exe's and labels it shouldn't in theory matter where they came from during boot should it?
I'm at a loss as to figuring this one out. Could it be a 32bit OS thing? A FAT32 thing? There's that whole '4GB' memory threshold in both isn't there. Perhaps the 8GB chip is being read twice as two lots of four by the host machine?
...
Ok, now I'm just thinking out loud. I really have no idea.
Is Windows scanning on insertion (before the Start PortableApps.com choice comes up)? Because that's independent of PortableApps.com.
As for the drive... there's a solid chance your new drive is slower than your old one. Drive stats are only listed as solid reads and solid writes (how fast will it get at maximum when copying a 500MB file, for instance). Portable apps depend on small reads and writes switching back and forth so the drive stats listed on packages are pretty meaningless. This depends on fast flash RAM and fast controller chips.
All things being equal (controller, flash ram) a larger drive will be slower than a smaller one.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
It just occured to me that the bar in the menu also only reads 7GB as the size of the drive. Upon installing the 1.1 platform alone it did actually first inform me that I had '7.5GB available on a 7GB drive.'
Now, I know manufacturers labelling is pretty haphazard in itself and that the drive in effect was closer to being 7.5GB than 8, but I found it a little peculiar that PAM had seemingly lost 500MB.
Anywho, cheers for your thoughts and I look forward to furthur 1.x progression. This will simply have to be something I live with for the time being.
May I ask is their now a finite timeframe for these PAM releases or is it still largely 'as and when'?
though luckily My Computer still shows 8gb. Well, it shows Capacity as 8,001,239,012 GB and then 7.45 GB. Does PAM round down?
Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.
binary count vs decimal count:
8,001,239,012
/1024
7813709.97265625
/1024
7630.576145172119140625
/1024
7.4517345167696475982666015625
e.g.
An 80 GB hard drive decimal is a 74.4 GB hard drive binary
think of the old "magic" numbers
2,4,16, 64, and the every popular 1024
1kb = 1,024 (not 1000)
Tim
Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?
Hi John,
On the mojopac website they suggest that you optimize the USB connection/device for performance.
http://www.mojopac.com/portal/content/how/optimize.jsp
Would this help or not really?
I tried it but it did not seem to make a difference, but then again I could have selected the wrong device as it's not all that obvious.
Regards
Paul