[SOLVED] Slow performance with 4K monitor

[Rinbad]

Until a few months ago I was running an LG 1920 x 1080 monitor with my Intel NVC 8iHNK PC with 16 GB RAM. The two programs I'm concerned with here both worked fine. I then switched to a Samsung LF32TU87 4K display at 3840 x 2160 which is absolutely fine for all purposes except these two programs, both of which I have beenusing quite heavily and for which I haven't found equally good substitutes. One is the Windows clipboard extender ClipMate, which has not been updated for several years. The program cuts, saves, and pastes just as it did in the past, but when I want to bring a display of the clip-list on screen it has become extremely slow to load (2 or 3 minutes). The other is the character-map replacement BabelMap. I had version 13 of this, and this behaved in a similar fashion: it was incredibly slow to load (even slower than ClipMate) but then seemed to work quite normally. I have just tried to install the new version 14 of this program, only to find that this does not load at all. The only thing I can put the problem with these two down to is the change of monitor, but I cannot find any explantion anywhere I have looked of why for just two programs the change should make such a difference, rendering both of them pretty useless. Can anyone offer an explanation — and if possible a cure, please?

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Both ClipMate and Babelmap look to be coded in a very old pre-dot-net version of VB, maybe VB6, and both would probably use some crude pixel mapping routine to draw the user interface, which maybe doesn't work too well with the desktop scaling you need to do on a 4K monitor to be able to read things. It could be that both these apps are using the same VB6 screen drawing function or frame buffer function or something, which hasn't been optimised for resolutions as high as 4K and takes forever to load.

1080p has 2M pixels, but a 4k monitor has 8M pixels, 4 times more, so at the very least it should be doing 4 times the amount of work. But maybe the developers never accounted for resolutions above 1080p and there are some unexpected issues with certain VB6 functions at 4k.

 

[Rinbad]

Both ClipMate and Babelmap look to be coded in a very old pre-dot-net version of VB, maybe VB6, and both would probably use some crude pixel mapping routine to draw the user interface, which maybe doesn't work too well with the desktop scaling you need to do on a 4K monitor to be able to read things. It could be that both these apps are using the same VB6 screen drawing function or frame buffer function or something, which hasn't been optimised for resolutions as high as 4K and takes forever to load.

1080p has 2M pixels, but a 4k monitor has 8M pixels, 4 times more, so at the very least it should be doing 4 times the amount of work. But maybe the developers never accounted for resolutions above 1080p and there are some unexpected issues with certain VB6 functions at 4k.

Thanks — that certainly sounds plausible, even if it probably does mean I'll need to go on trying to find alternatives half as good! Not surprising with ClipMate, which hasn't been updated since 2015, but more so with BabelMap, which has been regularly updated, most revently only a few weeks ago. Pity, as 4K is no longer a rarity.

 

[TommyTwoTone66]

Old applications often get updated but not necessarily tested at all resolutions. Maybe the guys at babelmap know about the issues in 4K resolution but can’t fix them, or maybe they just don’t know. Maybe you could shoot them an email with the issues you’re having?

there are so many great clipboard extensions out there I am sure you will find a modern replacement for ClipMate. Even the stuff that comes with office 2019 is pretty good.