Medialab running slow Windows 7 vs XP

[I][edited by moderator][/I]

We have two studies using Medialab. One was programmed 2 years ago and includes short questionnaires in experiment files. It includes some randomisation. At the time, Medialab would only work without crashing on XP operating systems so we purchased 4 XP laptops to run this study. After our purchase, Medialab was updated and the files worked on Windows 7 machines as well.

We are currently preparing files for our second study. We purchased 4 Windows laptops for this study. The study interviews include short questionnaires in experiment files and one questionnaire using a response.xls file. These files run on the Windows 7 machines but with a 2 second or more time delay between screens and some flashing. This is Medialab 2010. It seems pages with more text take longer to load. These files run fine on the XP machines. We can't buy XP laptops so we need a solution to the pauses and flashes. Please let us know if you have any suggestions.

We also have a Windows 7 machine running Medialab 2008 and the pauses are not as long but pages with a lot of text are still taking a few seconds to load. We are going to try downgrading to Medialab 2008 on the Windows 7 machines to see if this helps.

I would really appreciate it if someone could look into this. I can send the files and would be willing to go through it over the phone ASAP. Please let me know.

Some additional details.

We have these two different study files in different folders on the desktop. We found that on the Windows 7 machines if we move the questionnaire files on to the desktop, out of their folders, they run a lot quicker and without the flashing between screens. Running the same files from the folders, it runs slowly and with flashing.

The fact that a study would run off the desktop faster than from any other folder is very unusual. The desktop folder is just like any other, the exception being that the permissions may vary as a function of the user. E.g., the desktop is usually located in the [I]c:\users\your name\desktop[/I] folder. First thing I would check is to right click on that desktop folder (by navigating to it through C:\). Then check the properties to see what kind of permissions you have on that desktop folder vs. the permissions you have on the previous folder. Other question--does this happen for the MediaLab samples? And finally, is the use of a [I]responses.xls[/I] file a correlate of the delay between questions?