I'm finding Skritter pretty much unusable on my new netbook (Samsung N210, with 2GB of Ram - that's the N450 processor). I've got all the latest drivers and browsers and so on (have tried Opera, Firefox and Chrome), and have made sure anything running in the background is shut down. But it still fails to pick up a huge number of strokes.

I was more or less expecting this, and accept that a netbook isn't going to be able to do everything. However I'm curious as to whether or not anyone is successfullly using Skritter on a similar specced device, and is able to write characters smoothly (ie at speed, not pausing between strokes). I'm hoping there's something I've missed . .

We often use skritter on a netbook with Chrome - an hp mini 1000. We haven't loaded a lot of stuff on it, (realizing its limitations) but it works well for skritter. The feel of skritter on it is the same as working on the desktop. Well, a bit slower at loading but about the same when following strokes - not enough delay to be bothersome. It does not fail to "pick up strokes".

Check this thread:

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=26357402&comments=8

I posted a video of Skritter running on my tiny little Benq MID PC, after installing the latest Flash beta (10.3) and Intel GMA500 drivers, it runs well enough not to annoy me (and I'm pretty easily annoyed by these things). Yours uses a GMA X3150, which I'm not sure the flash drivers support yet in terms of hardware acceleration, but it's worth a shot!

Huh, I don't know why others' netbooks are so different when it comes to Skritter performance. It runs pretty well on our older Acer Aspire One netbook with an N270 CPU and 1GB of RAM. I just looked at the specs for N450 vs. N270 and N450 should be slightly faster. So, this is weird.

If you want, you can download and run PassMark's free PerformanceTest and post your netbook's results. I just compared several baselines for the netbooks mentioned here and in the other thread, which all use either N270, N280, or N450 CPUs.

CPU performance was roughly equal among all of them, which makes sense. The Samsung N210 was better on a lot of stuff, but it (and the other ones with N450 CPUs) had a surprising performance hit on most of the 2D graphics tests, with only 60% of the performance. Suck!

My uninformed guess is that because the N450s include graphics processing inside the CPU that the manufacturers skimped on or otherwise messed up the separate onboard graphics processing. If anyone knows more details of the GMA 3150 graphics in these things, vs. the GMA 950 that's in the others, I'd be glad to hear them (quick inspection looks like its stats are lower).

I found plenty of baselines for the other netbooks, but only one for the Samsung N210, so if you want to confirm this with your machine, post its 2D Graphics Mark. The results do vary a lot even on the same model, so I may have gotten a bad read on that one.

@themagicpen and @sarac, what OSes are you running?

I have the N310 with only 1gb of ram and skritter runs fine. It's a bit slow to load characters every now and again, but when im writing there are no problems.

I would definitely check CPU throttling. Out of the box it's very aggressive on a bunch of netbooks.

Also check for hogging background processes? msconfig in run?

No CPU throttling going on (the N210 throttles down to 50% on battery out of the box, but I've already changed that, and was on power anyway). OS is Windows 7. There might have been a few processes hanging around, but nothing resource heavy.

Will post PassMark results shortly, am going to restart before running it. And then I'm going to see if Flash 10.1 makes any difference - it's only beta, but I'm an adventurous kind of guy . . .

Ok , the flash installer crashed, so I'm leaving that one for now. 2D Graphics mark of 110.8, and I've uploaded, so there are two N210s on there now (also, the N220 is basically the same machine if you want more comparisons).

It's kind of hard to describe what's happening - basically I can see the cursor moving around just fine, but Flash is failing to draw the ink below it when it should. I've played around with the tablet settings in case it's a sensitivity issue, but no improvement.

Yup, got two N210s now and two N220s, and they are all remarkably consistent in the 2D Graphics Mark. Things are looking grim for the N210, unless there are more settings that need configuring. But 2D graphics performance isn't necessarily the biggest limiting factor in the Skritter app. Cursor moving smoothly is a good sign.

What kind of framerates are you seeing? (Hit Ctrl+Alt+F to toggle framerate display in Skritter.) If your framerate isn't dropping much, then I would suspect tablet settings after all. There are several settings that make it poor at sending clicks and mousedown events when doing this sort of drawing. Try each of the settings in this thread:
http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=25115546

Also, see if it does the same thing with a mouse or the touchpad.

Ah, now that seems to have made a difference - I didn't know those Pen and Touch control settings were there in Windows 7, I was relying on the Bamboo Properties dialogue. It's a bit late now, but will have a proper session tomorrow and hopefully be able to consider this solved.

Looks like I should have pegged this as a Windows 7 issue, not a netbook one.

on my lenovo ideapad s10 skritter is quite slow too
with both flashplugin 10 and flashplugin 10.1 beta

here a screenshot of the "lagometer"
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/3522/201003231741041024x576s.png

Glad to hear it's working!

That's on Linux, right, maci? I think Linux Flash is definitely going to be slower, so I'm not surprised that a netbook running Linux is too slow (although it is always disappointing when we can't yet support a platform well).

James - Our netbook runs W7 and we're using Chrome.

themagicpen - It took some time and some assistance from Nick to get the tablet working well. It is not intuitive.

yep, linux

chromium 5.0.307.11
flashplugin-prerelease 10.1.51.95

the ink-thingy also lags a bit behind the cursor

Right, that's much nicer now, and I'm a much happier Skritterer. However, I do notice I've forgotten a lot since my last session about three weeks ago - is there a fix for that?