4.1.28 compatible issue with Win7 widget and outlook 2013

In Server setting, Performance, disable Use acceleration for display processing. See the screenshot attached.

This DirectX acceleration is what gives the big performance boost to NX 4.1 on Windows. It was extensively tested in in the last 5 months on Vista, 7 and Windows 8, with a wide range of applications and games. Not all possible games and applications, obviously.

We would love to introduce features in Beta versions and collect useful feedback from a big number of users for a couple of months, so that, when the feature is finally released to the public we can be reasonably confident that it will work in all possible combinations of HW and SW, but unfortunately things are not as easy as we would like to be. For example we made 7 different previews available from 2010 to 2014 and still in the 4.0 we had to solve a big number of bugs that had been in the software for 4 years and that nobody had ever reported. This is because NoMachine is not Microsoft and the number of users who are available to help as beta testers is proportionally small. Add to this that NoMachine, at the present moment, is almost exclusively used by professionals that only care about getting the job done. They have no motivation to play with something new. You can understand by yourself how getting feedback and bug reports while the SW is still in Beta is everything but simple. At the same time the number of possible HW and SW versions we can test is small, compared to the hundred of thousands users that download NoMachine.

But there is another option: introduce a feature as experimental and give users the possibility to try it. Unfortunately very few users in 2014 want to try experimental features. Very few users in 2014 ever go and change the configuration of something. Ten years ago it was normal for people to install a software and then play with the configuration to get the best performance. Not so anymore. Today everybody wants the software to “just work”. This is demonstrated by the fact we need to explain how to improve the quality of the display in this forum, something that would be easy to experiment with, if only people would be willing to experiment. But people are not willing to experiment, because they (rightly so) have something more important to do in their life. So for us, poor software vendors, is really difficult to strike a balance. In fact the way it works nowadays is that vendors introduce features and get feedback that they otherwise would be never able to get, while, at the same time, being quick to fix the bugs that they were unable to find by themselves. For example at the present moment I get 2 or 3 crashes a day from an application that is absolutely essential for my work. I never provided any bug report to the vendor, regardless of the vendor kindly asking to do that at each new crash. The application I’m talking about is free, it is used by hundreds of millions in the world and has corporate backings that, in theory, should be enough to iron out all possible bugs before distributing it to the users. But me and the vendor made a tacit pact: I use it for free while the vendor improves it, possibly introducing more bugs. The advantage for me is that I get a better application from one release to the other. The advantage for the vendor is that it gets bug reports from people like you that the vendor would have never gotten, even if it had kept the application in testing for many additional months.

I’m joking, of course, and we are surely not treating our users as beta testers. I think people underestimate the complexity of a software like NoMachine. They see “remote desktop” and think about a software that, at most, can be a couple thousands lines of code. It is not like that. The lines of code are in the number of millions, the number of layers a packet or a function have to traverse, the number of regression tests, new and old functionalities, different use cases, platforms and operating systems, packages and combinations we need to test at each new release is appalling. Of course we make mistakes and there is no excuse for that.

This is because NoMachine is not Microsoft and the number of users who are available to help as beta testers is proportionally small

How can I join the beta testers list? 🙂