Susheel's Blog

A quick press — I was running Visual Studio Express 2010 on XP a couple of days back and I found it to be rather slow. The intellisense was performing horribly and the entire system was rather sluggish with a ridiculous amount of disk access — almost to the point where I had to physically shut the system down using the power switch. I initially thought it was an install problem, but ironically realized it wasn’t the case after losing another half hour in a reinstall. After googling around (, which I should have done earlier,) I found some people had similar problems and the solution to the problem is rather simple. You just need to update the Automation API to version 3.0.  :-( Windows 7 already has the latest API and doesn’t have this problem.

UPDATE: Another input from a friend. Apparently you can speed things even more by using /SafeMode switch. Unfortunately it may create problems with third-party plugins you may have with your Visual Studio. For Visual Studio Express, which doesn’t support plugins, you can try this option. I must say however, I didn’t find too much of a difference myself on my current project.

UPDATE 2: Apparently all my problems were solved after following steps 1, 2, 3 and 4 mentioned here. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff716700

Update (Not really): Neither me nor most programmers I know who are using VS 10 could solve this issue satisfactorily. I would recommend moving projects to Visual Studio 2012. It is much better and more stable than VS 2010. It’s been out for a while now and there’s no point in continuing with VS 2010 that clearly has some issues with speed and disk access.

Visual Studio 2012 : http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads
Visual Studio 2012 Express : http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-products