VS2010 and Windows XP SP3

Question

At home I've been running VS 2010 on a Windows 7 x64 machine without any issues, however at work we recently switched over to VS 2010 running on WinXP SP3 x86 - and I gotta say, the experience is terrible.

There are severe graphical glitches. For ex,

1. Intellisense doesn't quite work. You can start typing and the intellisense dropdown window seems to be working, but the text I'm typing vanishes. I can't see it until I hit the Escape key or refresh the window by say, alt-tabbing to another application and then back again to VS2010

2. If I cut/copy/paste and then move the cursor around by scrolling or using the arrow keys, different parts of the text window don't update themselves properly. I can see patches of a different piece of code where it shouldn't be.

Other team members are also facing the similar issues as well. Is there some patch that I should install? I have already installed the UIA 3 patch ScottGu mentioned in his blog.

Any help would be appreciated.

-Thanks!

Answer 1

You might want to look at the system requirements for 2010.

Yes, XP with SP3 is supported, but is the video card in your desktop DirectX 9 capable? Also, does it have enough video RAM? I'm guessing if you are using a system that is still running XP, that it is an older machine... which generally means the video is crap.

You might just have to upgrade that. As a side note if you are using a machine where the video is built in to the motherboard, then you really want to go buy a real video card.

If the card is DX9, is not built in to the motherboard, and has a decent amount of RAM available, then you might look at the video drivers to see if there are new ones available.

Note, when VS 2005 first shipped, we had the same visual glitches and a very slow design surface. In some cases the design surface wouldn't even bother showing. After dropping in a decent video card (at the time), visual studio rocked. I expect 2010 with all its eye candy has exactly the same issues.

Answer 2

Try disabling hardware rendering (if it is enabled):

Uncheck Tools->Options->Environment->General->Enable rich client visual experience. You may also need to uncheck Tools->Options->Environment->General->Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance.

Answer 3

Go to Control Panel / System / Advanced / Performance and select "Adjust for best appearance". It took care of that problem on my machine.

Answer 4

Well, I finally found the solution eventually. The trick is to turn off hardware rendering completely through the registry. Here's the link- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa970912.aspx#disablehardwareacceleration