Flickering and rolling screen

Reckon Accounts Personal Plus 2016; Windows 10 64 bit; GTX1050 Graphics

Have always had a problem with screen flickering and multiple 'rolling" as I move between accounts. With my new computer and graphics the problem is now worse - can take seconds to move between account displays where the screen just keeps refreshing and flickering until eventually the display appears. I have tried all the recommendations I can find with no success.

It seems to me that the program was written for a very low resolution display and the higher you go the worse it gets. All my other software works well with the new computer. I am not prepared to go back to SVGA!

Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated

Comments

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John Campbell

Reckon,

Isn't it about time you actually committed some effort to fixing these problems.
Why can't you investigate the poor performance ?

It should not be too hard to place some performance monitoring into the program to investigate where the problems are coming from.

Modern computers are now very fast. Computations that took me 10 minutes in 1995 are now taking 1 to 2 seconds. In 1995 disk transfers that were about 10 MBytes/sec on HDD are now 200 - 500 MBytes/sec SSD's. Performance of most other products have improved dramatically, so why the blinking screens ?

It is likely that some cacheing strategies in PP are clashing with Windows 7/10 disk cacheing or some memory buffer sizes are too small, now that most users have at least 4gb of memory available and a much faster (cached) disk drive.

Is there no-one who knows the basics of supporting PP ? because you are clearly taking us and our subscriptions for a ride !!

Malcolm Fowler

Totally agree - but history says that Reckon will do nothing. It's a pity that we the users can't get the message across and actually get some action.

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Rav

Malcolm,
Here's a screencap of my Personal Plus 2019 installation on a Windows 10 Enterprise (64 bit) PC. You've mentioned this occurs when you move between accounts, while I only have a few accounts set up for the purpose of testing, prolonged 'flickering, rendering or rolling' isn't something that I or a couple of colleagues have been able to replicate.

As a troubleshooting measure, can I suggest you try the following steps -
- Close Reckon Accounts Personal
- Right click the desktop background
- Select 'Personalize' to open the Preview page
- In the 'Background' field, select Solid colour;
- Close the screen.
- Launch Reckon Accounts Personal

Use Personal Plus as you normally would after that including the activity you'd normally conduct when you encounter the flicker issues. Does the issue persist?

Malcolm Fowler

Rav,

Your suggestion was one of the first things I tried - with no success I'm afraid.

I suspect the issue is related to the number of accounts and transactions - your few accounts set up for testing is hardly representative of real use.

I have 25 live accounts (and probably as many "dead") with transactions dating from 1993. I am loathe to start afresh as the whole point of having a transaction register is to be able to look back intime as well as forward budget.

I would send you my screen recording except I'm not prepared to publish my finances to the world!
From a cold start it takes upto 16 seconds for one of my Allocated Pension accounts to be displayed - during the 16 seconds there are many screen refreshes/rolls - I would say about 25 of them although some are too quick to count. The problem is not quite as severe when in use between accounts - the delay then is anywhere between 4 and 10 seconds - all of which are unnacceptable.

I am running the latest version of Windows 10 Home 64 bit; Intel Core i5 3.4GHz; 8GBDual Channel DDR 665MHz memory; Gigabyte H87-D3H-CF Motherboard; NVidia GTX1050 Graphics; LG Ultra HD 3840 x 2160 monitor and Samsung SSD 840 Pro primary disc drive.

No other software that I run has any problems with this hardware setup

Malcolm Fowler

Further to the above and in support of the concept that the account/transaction loading has a major effect I have just run one of your Sample Files (1.15MB) and all is good - no flickering/rolling and instant moves between accounts. My data file is 35MB and something in the program isn't able to handle that correctly - surely this should be a relatively simple fix for a programmer?

PS Rav, how large is your test data file?

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Malcolm Fowler

Thanks for the advice and I will seriously consider doing that if nothing can be done by Reckon. Either that or I will revert to a series of linked spreadsheets were there is no such data overload issue. In this day and age a 35MB data base should not be causing a supposedly "supported", currently sold piece of software to be falling over.!

Perhaps Reckon should be mentioning the limitation on the size of the database that can be handled in their promotional material

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John Campbell

Rav,

I mentioned in another thread:

"It would certainly be a useful utility if the .qph file could be restructured, to contain all records for each company sequentially and remove non-existent/deleted company records. This could also assist the flickering when it relates to investment screens. Another wait for Jesus improvement !
As we have seen with the flickering post, we will be limited by performance before file size should be an issue."

A utility that could restructure the .qph file may be a useful addition. At the moment, all price records are scattered through the .qph file, in order of when they are added to the file.

An alternative of re-writing the price records one company at a time, in an order that suits the RPP reading, could improve the RPP performance.

For the investment screen report, it is my understanding that the flickering is due to the updating of on-screen information as RPP processes each company for each statistic. Optimising the disk reading to process the file sequentially could help.

Another review should be of the disk read routines being used in RPP to check if they utilise disk cache/buffering. It would not be surprising to find that the disk I/O routines predate the operating system disk cacheing routines. Is disk cacheing enabled for the .qph file? I would hope that other Reckon packages have adopted this, so there should be some experience of this in other Rekon package development teams. (There must be some development going on somewhere ?)

Another issue is that the .qph file contains a lot of obsolete information.
When a company code is changed, all price records are duplicated.
In about 2004, when all company codes were changed, all price records were duplicated.
When a company name is changed, the company record is duplicated and price records may also be duplicated.
It should be possible to identify all company records and price records that are required for the .qdf database, so obsolete records can be removed.
This should improve the RPP performance.
It is like a QPH_Validate !

If this utility could be provided, I am sure there are users who could try it out.
It is a simple matter; save the old .qph file, generate a new ordered .qph file and then run RPP

Please ask for someone to review this performance.

Ifti

Hi Malcom,

Thank you for your post and sorry to hear about the issues that you're facing.

I'd like you to try few things to see if they help:

If you're using Scaling, then please change it to 100%. Click here to read an article
Create a copy of your file (File > File Operations > Copy)
Use the copied file
Check your file to see if that improves the file performance
If that doesn't work, perform a rename of the file from File > File Operations > Rename. Keep it short and simple
Check your file again

Please let us know how that goes and we'll take it from there.

Thanks

Ifti

Malcolm Fowler

Hi Ifti,

If I take the scaling back to 100% then apart from the fact that I can hardly read the print it made absolutely no difference to the flickering and rolling issue.

I had already ticked the Compatibility box to override the high DPI scaling behaviour in order to get a clear display - this again, apart from making the displayed characters clearer did nothing to change the flickering or rolling between accounts.

The fact that everything works perfectly with one of your small Sample files would indicate that the issue has nothing to do with my graphics setup

I have copied the file and given it a short name "Q" - no difference in performance was observed

John Campbell

Malcolm,

I find that the flickering is worse when I am updating share prices.

This can vary, by selecting different "Show:" screens.

"Historical Performance" is extremely slow

"Price Update" is much faster as long term stats are not presented.

Do you find a similar response ?

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Malcolm Fowler

I enter all data manually - transactions and unit prices. My main largest accounts are allocated pensions. My problem is when I move between accounts - that's when the delays and flickering/rolling occur - it is as though the screen is refreshing as each step of closing one account and opening another is performed.

Once I am in an account or even the Portfolio view there is very little problem either with the display or the speed.

The Allocated pension "files" are very large and it may be that the historic data is only updated when I leave the account?

I have not noticed much difference within the Portfolio View if I remove the 3 and 5 year performance figures

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Malcolm Fowler

Dave,

I don't have any linked bank accounts - I record all transactions manually. My Pension accounts are following the transactions in managed investments - not individual shares.

I am using Reckon PP 2016 and have a "First Page" with All Accounts on the left hand side; Net Worth and Expenses in the centre and Accounts in the Right hand pane.

I have always moved between accounts by clicking on the relevant account name in the All Accounts listing on the left of my First Page. I then usually return to the First Page to select another account.

I have just tried using the "permanent" account list on the right hand side and this opens the relevant account quickly and with hardly any screen flickering/rolling and the Accounts panel remains visible so I can click on another account and move directly to it - again this seems to be almost immediate!

So it seems my particular problem may be resolved by using the account list that resides "permanently" in the right pane rather than the more detailed Accounts pane that I have added when customising my First Page.

Not at sure why this happens and never thought to try it before !!

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Ifti

Thanks for sharing that Malcolm. I will pass it to the developer to see if he can find anything specific about it.

Thanks

Ifti

Malcolm Fowler

Dave,

It continues to work well - I'm amazed what a difference it makes to my state of mind when I move around updating accounts!

I did try using the accounts icon in the toolbar but this just seems to open the main Account list (where you can also manage the accounts). If I double click on an account here to open it the flickering and rolling are at an all time high - basically terrible! So I'm very happy to stay with the permanent accounts list displayed on the left or right of the screen.

Thanks for asking me how I enter an account - I would never have thought of trying different methods without your prompt!

Cheers, Malcolm

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Anne Sterling

Not sure how to reply to Rav (I am new) but I turned my desktop to solid colour rather than the revolving photos I had on there, and my flickering problem has gone away!