Hello,

Brand new customer to Stardock. I had tried the trial of Fences a long time ago (I believe it was version 1 or 2), and I was quite impressed. Since then I have seen numerous friends and co-workers using Fences as I lingered over their shoulders... amazed at how incredibly useful Fences was in their everyday routine. After seeing how simple and effective everything was - and nothing seemed to suffer as a consequence of using a utility for organizing the desktop (and so much more of course). It reignited my interest in Fences, this time with the intent on purchasing it. I remember asking a few of my peers if they found it slowed things down - or if they even noticed it working in the background? Almost everyone stated there had been times, but usually through improvements and builds, these were not noticeable once things were hammered out.

I am a graphic designer by trade, and a gamer in my spare time, and tend to enjoy a higher-ended machine that can provide the "zippy" feel I love with having a lean, mean computer. In fact being a bit of a techy person over the years, I've prided myself on keeping my rigs as lean and speedy as could be. I am much more aligned with the "function over forum" philosophy, although I love attractive interfaces and graphics, being a graphic designer... I would much prefer something that simply performed better than something that looked better. It seemed from what I had heard from my peers and read a few places, that Fences was everything it was purported to be. That's when I made my purchase (actually of the entire Object Desktop Suite since you had such a great deal at the time).

Anyway... as the title implied, after a couple of weeks working with Fences, I have found it sure is useful and attractive to use, but I have experienced in my opinion unacceptable slowdown/lagging when doing anything on the desktop in Fences from dragging and dropping, deleting, and simply opening. There has been a noticeable delay for such simple tasks as I mentioned, that it has gotten to the point I am not sure I want to use it - even as useful as it is.

Throughout these forums I have read numerous people complain about similar situations, although they range from years ago to recently. So I'm really not sure what to expect. I do have a very good motherboard, video card, 16gb ram, ssd. I am running Windows 8.1 x64 if that is helpful - but plan on eventually moving to Windows 10 as some time.

Just to be clear... as soon as I disable Fences, and go back to the way it was before installing it... my computer responds to commands and tasks very quickly as it had always done. So it really makes me think that Fences is the culprit. Again, turning it on, and repeating the same tasks... everything feels noticeably slower.

So as a new customer, I am disappointed to find this out so soon, before even trying any of the other products in the Object Desktop. I have notice customers talking about rolling back to version 3.0.1 for e.g. - but I see on my Stardock account I only seem able to access the latest versions of your software (granted you have made Fences 2.0 available to me). Do you not allow customers to have access to previous builds like many other software companies, that you list here:

https://www.stardock.com/products/fences/history

I would very much appreciate trying an older version than the only version of 3.x I have access to is 3.0.5. If there is a chance that a previous version may run better than the current one, can your customers not use one of those older builds?

Thank you for helping me in trying to figure out how I can get Fences to perform in a manner without a delay/slowdown/sluggishness. Again, I personally don't see the point of using something if it takes away the responsiveness of the performing the same activities without the software, no matter how attractive it looks.

Much appreciated