X6 Performance Issues on Windows 7

Hi there - I’ve recently purchased EndNote and am having quite a few performance problems. Specifically, most of the time even the simplest of actions takes an age, such as scrolling or clicking on an item. Every now and again it will behave itself I and can get some work done!

Now this may be a Windows problem, but I’ve tried closing all apps apart from EndNote and the problems remain. I’m using a Lenovo Thinkpad W510 with 12GB of RAM, running Windows 7 64-bit.

My library has just over 4000 references in it, I’ve around 8GB of PDFs in total, and have around 70 Smart Groups set up.

Any advice on how to get to the bottom of this would be appreciated.

Cheers,

  • Pete

Have you updated it to X6.0.1 (from the Endnote help menu).  

Do you have any other add-in s installed that  may be conflicting?  Bluetooth?  

Thanks - yes, it’s 6.0.1.

How do I determine what “might” be conflicting? And do you know what the likely conflicts are?

Thx.

  • Pete

I’ve just performed a “Recover Library” (no change in performance), uninstalled EndNote, reinstalled without Word integration, and have rebooted - and I’m still having major problems.

It looks like EndNote is doing something every 5 seconds or so because I’m getting a sequence of:

  • Busy (for 5 seconds)

  • Not busy (for 1 second)

  • Busy (for 5 seconds)

  • Not busy (for 1 second)

  • etc.

All other apps are fine. Any idea what EndNote is doing - and what I might need to turn off? I’m a new user and simply want to look at a library of references (I’m not doing anything unusual!). It has behaved in the past, but the performance seems to have gotten worse.

Thx.

hmm.  Add-ons usually in word, so that can’t be it.  – It might still be indexing pdfs, but it usually tells you that.  and you aren’t using it on a cloud drive, are you?  

The only other thing that I had a conflict once with was Bluetooth, which I turned off, cause I never use on my laptop, and it went away… 

Thanks. This is a standalone installation, all files are on my local disk, and switching off bluetooth and other mobile devices has no effect.

One thing I’ve noticed in the Task Manager is that EndNote is the ONLY application that seems to be constantly doing “something”. The memory allocation is going up and down like a yoyo, constantly, (between 25KB and 250KB and everything in between) when all other applications have a fixed memory allocation - so EndNote is definitely doing something - anyone any idea what?

I thought it might be doing something with the PDFs (even though they’ve all been indexed) so moved the PDF directly altogether, and that hasn’t fixed it either.

The pdf_index.MYD file is 268KB.

Any help would be greatly appreciated since EndNote is unusable at the moment. Thx.

Cheers,

  • Pete

Hmmm. I’ve just realised that, although EndNote wasn’t configured to use Word 10 (which I use) for citation management (I don’t need this integration at all!), Word still has EndNoteX6 tab. Not sure if this is a clue.

  • Pete

Suggest you contact tech support. If there’s a problem with your library they have tools to diagnose/fix library files:

http://endnote.com/contact/customer-support

Thanks for all the help everyone. Tech Support has been incredibly useful in tracking down the issue (credit where credit’s due!).

The root cause is that EndNote “continuously monitors references for Smart Groups”, rather than updating the Smart Groups once, whenever a reference is created (and a PDF uploaded). This is by design and I’ll be sending in a design suggestion! This is why EndNote’s memory usage continuously fluctuates. I’ve removed all of my Smart Groups and everything is fine (I guess I’ll be creating and saving searches instead).

Therefore, if you have many Smart Groups (as I did), then performance will suffer and get worse as more Smart Groups and references are added. I hope this helps anyone else observing similar performance degradation.

  • Pete

Thanks for the information!  I use smart groups, but not a lot of them, I guess!