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How do I make LapLink Secure VNC go faster?

Cause

Solution

We find LapLink Secure VNC to be perfectly acceptable as our normal method of accessing desktops on a daily basis. There are several things that can slow any LapLink Secure VNC session down, however, and you may like to consider these if you find it too slow:

• Unusually 'busy' desktops. The LapLink Secure VNC protocol is very efficient at rendering areas of a single color, such as you generally find on window title bars, scrollbars, backgrounds of pages etc. But if, for example, you have pretty 24-bit photographs of your girlfriend as your screen background, or dithered title-bars on your windows, you may pay a price for the aesthetics. A colorful or patterned desktop background will probably slow down LapLink Secure VNC more than any other single factor.
• Hi-color desktops. Don't use 24-bit color if you can use 16 or 8 equally well. If you regularly connect to a remote LapLink Secure VNC server, consider whether you could run happily at lower resolution. A 1280x1024 screen has more then 4 times as many pixels as a 640x480 one, and if all you are doing is checking a printer queue you probably don't need them all! Note, though, that on LapLink Secure VNC, 16-bit color is usually the best to use.
• Elderly graphics cards or drivers may make quite a difference; this is a graphics-intensive application! On Windows the graphics system on the server will affect the speed as well as the one on the viewer.
• Some applications are not very economical about redrawing their display.
• If you are connecting to LapLink Secure VNC, don't change the default settings in the Properties box unless you need to.
• Generally, with LapLink Secure VNC, use 16-bit color (65536 colors) on the server if you can. 16-bit is almost always the best depth to use, because:
  1. 256-color screens have to be palette-converted before they can be transmitted to truecolor clients. Only if the client is 256-color palette- based will you see any performance increase. Even if the client is 256 color truecolor, it'll have to convert via a 32-bit truecolor palette!
  2. 24-bit screens have to be specially munged via 32-bit since LapLink Secure VNC's internal color-handling routines don't work with 24-bit directly.
  3. 24 and 32-bit screens have to have each pixel looked up in three tables to get the converted value.
  4. Graphics cards claiming to do 24-bit often actually do 32-bit with munging - this in many cases makes 24-bit slower just for general use than 32-bit!
  5. Finally, 16-bit involves no palette processing and a single lookup in a cached src_format to dest_format table to convert the pixels.

Product: Secure VNC
KB: 30  Last updated: Apr 1, 2001
Keywords: Internet: NAT 
Platforms:

• WinXP
• WinXP
• WinXP
• WinXP
• WinXP
• WinXP
• WinXP
• WinMe
• WinMe
• WinMe
• WinMe
• WinMe
• WinMe
• WinMe
• Win98/SE
• Win98/SE
• Win98/SE
• Win98/SE
• Win98/SE
• Win98/SE
• Win98/SE
• WinNT
• WinNT
• WinNT
• WinNT
• WinNT
• WinNT
• WinNT
• Win2K
• Win2K
• Win2K
• Win2K
• Win2K
• Win2K
• Win2K
• Win95
• Win95
• Win95
• Win95
• Win95
• Win95
• Win95

Wildcards (internal use):

• Internet
• NAT