NetBeans Display Woes

Andrew Hallam | | 6 May 2005, 18:51

The new Dell D610 notebook is a nice balance between portability and power, but when I ran NetBeans 4.0 on it during a commute I initially thought I had made a big mistake. Drop down menus were taking over 5 seconds to display, and the overall response of the NetBeans GUI was absolutely woeful.

After hunting through numerous Windows display settings and turning off most of the Windows XP eye candy the response was no better. I then found that the ATI Radeon X300 graphics card was running in “optimal battery life” mode while the notebook was running on battery (see the PowerPlay tab in the Advanced display settings). When I changed this to “performance” NetBeans started responding as expected.

A quick Google didn’t reveal anything useful, so on a whim I installed Sun’s JDK 5.0 (a.k.a. 1.5) and reinstalled NetBeans. This improved the GUI response significantly, to the point where it is usable when my graphics card is running in power saving mode. However, it still isn’t as responsive as my IDE of choice – IntelliJ IDEA.

Comments [12] »

  1. My <oXygen/> XML editor (version 6.0) has the same display speed issues as NetBeans on JDK 1.4.2 when my graphics card is is running in

    Andrew Hallam — 24 May 2005, 18:57

  2. Thank you! I've been struggling for months with NetBeans 4.1 on my laptop: for me, it runs too slowly to use when on batteries (and others have this problem: http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=636380&tstart=0). I even upgraded the memory without effect. But when I read this I disabled power management on my graphics card (ATI Radeon 9700) and it runs like a dream. This is a great tip, thank you.

    Steve — 5 July 2005, 14:15

  3. This is one of the most useful welogs that I have ever come across. And to let you know, there have been a lot of people at Dell trying to this out, and not only did they send me a new system, but they suggested that I do a clean install as well to correct the problem. I just got back from JavaOne, and I wish that I had read this beforehand (although luckily it was rare that an outlet could not be found). Anyway, after adjusting the settings on the Radeon X300 as per your instructions, the machine runs NetBeans 4.1 on battery power with identical performance to AC. Thank you so much, as I really like the D610 in theory and I was very close to returning it. It is a nice machine, unfortunately there is no one at Dell who understands its operation. Again, many thanks. And this is just one more reason why everyone should consider Sun when purchasing enterprise hardware.

    Bernard J. Sorahan — 17 July 2005, 01:04

  4. Thanks for excellent information, I had the same problem with my HP compaq nx7000 running NetBeans 4.1. Also, you might want to check out the Intel SpeedStep settings in your BIOS.

    Frank Gynnild — 30 July 2005, 04:24

  5. Yes, very useful. Same experience with Thinkpad T43p with ATI graphics card, netbeans 4.1. after adjusting ATI Powerplay settings to medium performance under battery power netbeans is back to normal. Thank you!

    tobi — 29 October 2005, 17:29

  6. Thanks man! Was investing this issue for weeks now. Had problems with different Java apps (UMLet, FreeMind, ...) when running in my IBM Thinkpad sooooo slow with batteries. Lighting fast with AC. No CPU speed tuning helped. But the enabled ATI PowerPlay was the reason! Thanks again! Greetings from Germany.

    DerWOK — 14 January 2006, 18:38

  7. Thank You, Thank You
    I have been struggling with this issue for a long long time on my Dell Latitude D610. I could not run Google Earth on battery power, anytime I tried to run video on battery power the screen would flash for 10 seconds, and anytime I switched from battery to ac power or vice versa my screen would annoyingly blink. I had tried dell's service - they told me that I should just expect subpar performance under battery and there was nothing I could do about it. I am much happier with my machine now...

    Thanks again!

    Locke Hutson — 20 January 2006, 20:40

  8. Thank you so much. Ive tried everything other than this to fix the problem. Just one question though, will having powerplay disabled significantly reduce my battery life. I havent had time to test it. Currently running Dell 8600 1.4ghz w/ 9600.

    Jack — 8 May 2006, 22:13

  9. Jack,

    Yes, disabling PowerPlay will reduce your battery life, but I don't know by how much. I'm no longer using NetBeans (for reasons other than this power issue).

    Andrew

    Andrew Hallam — 8 May 2006, 22:28

  10. I've been pissed at HP for 6 months now because my mobile processor downclocks and can't handle Netbeans. I finally got a new laptop with desktop processor in it and it kicks butt. I had no idea why my mobile was such a piece of crap. Great blog! I'm going to try to change the settings and see if it works.

    Ace — 4 June 2006, 13:48

  11. I have a new Dell E1505 laptop, with an ATI X1400. I was experiencing this same problem with Netbeans 5.0.

    I found the power saving option in the Catalyst Control Center and disabled it as suggested on this site, and now everything is peachy. Thanks so much for the help. I truly am grateful!

    Brandon — 14 August 2006, 12:35

  12. [...] Well, I set up netbeans and created a project and all, so I could get to serious work on my 2h train trip. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to write a single line of code! As soon as I opened my laptop, the Netbeans IDE seemed to have become very unresponsive! Opening a menu could take 10 seconds, scrolling through the code is impossible. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first, so I rebooted because I thought my laptop was having trouble waking up after having the short nap. However, not improved. I had to give up. At home, I searched the internet, and indeed, netbeans has problems with my ATI X600 ’s PowerPlay function! Who would have imagined that. Especially since this is the only Java app I have trouble with… Anyhow, just disabling the PowerPlay function solves the problem! It’s probably related to my ATI drivers, but since I have a fricking Dell laptop, I’m not allowed to install drivers other than from Dell, so, as you can imagine, Dell never supplies updates to the driver! If anyone knows how to circumvent the checks going on in the driver installer from ATI, please let me know… [...]

    Mattiesworld &raquo; Blog Archive &raquo; Netbean probs — 6 October 2006, 17:17

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