Folding Forum

I Fold on my Thinkpad laptop (Windows 7 x64). That works reasonably well - Folding pretty much stays in the background and I don't notice it (except for the extra heat and fan noise!). Recently my company upgraded us from Microsoft Office 2007 to Office 2013. Now I notice a difference!

There are many times (replying to a message in Outlook is the main one) where my machine will "hang" for a while. It might be a short time (a couple of seconds) or a long time (30 or more seconds). It might be just the Outlook windows that hang, or it might be the whole machine (mouse becomes completely unresponsive, etc). By process of elimination, I think I have discovered that this only happens when I am Folding in the background (but I'm still not completely sure).

Of course, my theory is that Outlook 2013 must have some processes running at a low priority in the background. These are either at the same priority as the Folding processes (so that they compete for cpu time), or (heaven forbid!) at a LOWER priority (so that Outlook is stuck behind the Folders)!

Has anyone noticed the same thing? If so, is there anything I can do about it (other than pause Folding while I am using Outlook)? If not, can you think of a way I can find out why Outlook is hanging? Does anyone have contacts a Microsoft who can confirm that Outlook 2013 works differntly (in my case, worse) from its predecessors?

Is it possible the newest version of Office is a much larger resource hog than the previous version? I think we all know the answer to that.

How to mitigate the behavior depends on if you are folding on both the CPU and GPU, or just the CPU. Please describe the client setup, and post the *** System *** section of the fah log file.

Can you please tell us if you are folding on the CPU or the GPU? I suspect that you are folding on the GPU since Microsoft Office 2013 will use hardware acceleration (using the GPU instead of the CPU for rendering purposes). In Office 2013, you can disable the hardware acceleration by:
File -> Options -> Advanced (Left Panel) -> Display (Right Panel) and selecting the option:
Disable hardware graphics acceleration

I am using Office 2013 but haven't encountered this issue since I am using the iGPU (Intel HD 4000) for all normal applications while the dGPU (Nvidia GTX 675M) is used for folding. BTW, have you updated to the latest driver version of your GPU vendor to see if the issue is still present or not?

Thumperman wrote:Recently my company upgraded us from Microsoft Office 2007 to Office 2013. Now I notice a difference!

As PX and 7im pointed out, it's probably the GPU HW acceleration in newer MS products conflicting with FAH GPU work. On a side note, since it is a company laptop, do you have permission (preferably written) to run FAH on that laptop? If not, get one, otherwise folding on that piece of HW is against FAH EULA. Please don't take this as nitpicking, the EULA is there to protect your best interests more than anything else. None of us here want to see you stomping on a firing ground accidentally, and there are precedents of people getting fired for installing SW such as FAH without permission.