t.s.lim Posted May 18, 2011 Report Share Posted May 18, 2011 Hi, I am running WinXP and ME ver3. I am impressed by what MEP can do compare to ME when flipping through its on-line help file, so is keen to upgrade to this PRO version. However, few posts here scares me, it looks like some of you found MEP so buggy and the extend of the MEP bugs is intolerable under Windows of Vista based engine (that includes Win7) May I seek your opinion, since I am still stick with WinXP, should I upgrade... I mean are those bugs merely Window Vista/7 related? 1. My ME ver3 is stably consume about 11732K memory no matter how long I leave it running, I won't want to upgrade if MEP eat up more and more resources after running for a while, (sort of memory leak problem) 2. I also don't want to upgrade if MEP causes a performance impact which is much heavier than ME Is there anyone running WinXP find MEP OK? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cory Posted May 18, 2011 Report Share Posted May 18, 2011 I would. For the most part MEPruns pretty well. I have a client who has about 20 users that use it all dayand for them it all works fine. And I have another client who uses it onautomated machines to do data entry all day long for a hospital and those workfine too. There are a few bugs but several have been fixed recently and othersare easily worked around. And most of the issues I have found seem to beisolated to me so I'm not certain it's really the fault of the product or atleast it would seem that my case is so isolated it's not worth worrying about.Bottom line it has some problems but I think the benefits far outweigh it. Andyou can try it for a while and if it proves to buggy you don't have to buy it.But I can say one feature like named variables far outweighs all of the currentproblems. I should say it also depends on your skill level. For simple'recorded' text type macros you may as well stay with ME3. 1. MEP consumes 2.6M on my W7-64 machine. 6.4 on the Server 2008 64bit. 2. I run MEP on all Windows OSs and they all run equally quickly. ME3 for some variable ops is faster and a few thing like clipboard ops are slower in MEP. But that's also because they're doing a lot more cleverness that makes it more reliable and useful IMHO. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
t.s.lim Posted May 18, 2011 Author Report Share Posted May 18, 2011 I would. For the most part MEPruns pretty well. I have a client who has about 20 users that use it all dayand for them it all works fine. And I have another client who uses it onautomated machines to do data entry all day long for a hospital and those workfine too. There are a few bugs but several have been fixed recently and othersare easily worked around. And most of the issues I have found seem to beisolated to me so I'm not certain it's really the fault of the product or atleast it would seem that my case is so isolated it's not worth worrying about.Bottom line it has some problems but I think the benefits far outweigh it. Andyou can try it for a while and if it proves to buggy you don't have to buy it.But I can say one feature like named variables far outweighs all of the currentproblems. I should say it also depends on your skill level. For simple'recorded' text type macros you may as well stay with ME3. 1. MEP consumes 2.6M on my W7-64 machine. 6.4 on the Server 2008 64bit. 2. I run MEP on all Windows OSs and they all run equally quickly. ME3 for some variable ops is faster and a few thing like clipboard ops are slower in MEP. But that's also because they're doing a lot more cleverness that makes it more reliable and useful IMHO. I understand that there will be a conversion of ME3 macros if I install MEP for a trial and the conversion is irreversible... Is the installation of MEP converts my ME3 macro file directly (making it no more ME3 format) or does it produce new MEP macro file base on the existing ME3 macro file ? In brief, I want to be able to go back to ME3 easily, just in case... Btw, can I try MEP in VMWare, will it work? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted May 19, 2011 Report Share Posted May 19, 2011 I understand that there will be a conversion of ME3 macros if I install MEP for a trial and the conversion is irreversible... Is the installation of MEP converts my ME3 macro file directly (making it no more ME3 format) or does it produce new MEP macro file base on the existing ME3 macro file ? In brief, I want to be able to go back to ME3 easily, just in case... What's wrong with taking a copy of your ME3 macro file before converting? My take on MEP differs from Cory's. Although there are many new features in MEP (some of which are, or ought to be, very powerful and useful), several of them require some effort to learn, and in all cases you'll have to rework/rewrite your macros to take advantage of them. And you can't miss what you've never used! If your ME3 macros are all satisfactory, then I'd be inclined not to upgrade - MEP is still very buggy and doesn't seem to receive the same degree of attention from Insight as ME3 certainly used to. Many of its operations are far slower than they are in ME3, and some simply don't work properly (the worst example of this is running a macro directly from a variable; if you make use of this feature in ME3, then you should forget MEP altogether). And many of us experience an ongoing problem where MEP causes the machine to go very slowly indeed until it's terminated and restarted (and this is one of many problems Insight seems to have no interest or ability to resolve). MEP is a very mixed bag. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
t.s.lim Posted May 19, 2011 Author Report Share Posted May 19, 2011 What's wrong with taking a copy of your ME3 macro file before converting? If MEP installation always converts the deault macro file of my ME3, that means, I can't unload MEP, reload and run ME3 during my trial period (because now the macro file is in new format). I want to be able to switch to using either of them when trying MEP, can I? My take on MEP differs from Cory's. Although there are many new features in MEP (some of which are, or ought to be, very powerful and useful), several of them require some effort to learn, and in all cases you'll have to rework/rewrite your macros to take advantage of them. And you can't miss what you've never used! If your ME3 macros are all satisfactory, then I'd be inclined not to upgrade - MEP is still very buggy and doesn't seem to receive the same degree of attention from Insight as ME3 certainly used to. Many of its operations are far slower than they are in ME3, and some simply don't work properly (the worst example of this is running a macro directly from a variable; if you make use of this feature in ME3, then you should forget MEP altogether). And many of us experience an ongoing problem where MEP causes the machine to go very slowly indeed until it's terminated and restarted (and this is one of many problems Insight seems to have no interest or ability to resolve). MEP is a very mixed bag. I don't have complex macro. My reason of using ME3 (and hopefully, in the near future MEP) beside its main capability of automate certain task with macro: 1. I also use it as a scheduler for other programs. I dislike Window's native scheduler which is not flexible enough. I also find it hard to maintain the scheduling of some of my utilities (with built-in scheduler). I want a center scheduler to schedule everybody. (MEP has interesting improvement in this area which I like) 2. I also want a center keyboard hotkey manager, instead of letting utilities compete to react to hotkeys. 3. ME is a good program to serve as a password manager, one which feed password correctly, no matter how different the password input interfaces are (among utilities that are protected by password). In brief, it replaces the role of few utilities (which otherwise I will have to install and maintain). and I am runnung winXP... again, let me ask this: Is MEP memory hogging after using it over hours under XP? Does MEP slow down WinXP a lot compare to ME3? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted May 19, 2011 Report Share Posted May 19, 2011 If MEP installation always converts the deault macro file of my ME3, that means, I can't unload MEP, reload and run ME3 during my trial period (because now the macro file is in new format). I want to be able to switch to using either of them when trying MEP, can I? Have 2 copies of your macro file, 1 for ME3 and one for conversion to MEP. I don't see your problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cory Posted May 19, 2011 Report Share Posted May 19, 2011 I understand that there will be a conversion of ME3 macros if I install MEP for a trial and the conversion is irreversible... Is the installation of MEP converts my ME3 macro file directly (making it no more ME3 format) or does it produce new MEP macro file base on the existing ME3 macro file ? In brief, I want to be able to go back to ME3 easily, just in case... Btw, can I try MEP in VMWare, will it work? You can run ME3 and MEP on the same machine and I think it creates a new file But to be safe create a backup. It installs in different folders. MEP runs just fin in MS Virtual PC so I'm guessing the same would go for VMWare. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terrypin Posted May 19, 2011 Report Share Posted May 19, 2011 May I seek your opinion, since I am still stick with WinXP, should I upgrade... I mean are those bugs merely Window Vista/7 related? I use XP Pro. I'd broadly echo Paul's summary. On the plus side, some great features, like meaningfully-named variables. But too many bugs and design flaws, performance issues, and inexplicable crashes far more often than I used to get with ME3. I'm surprised to hear from Cory that it apparently runs regular tasks satisfactorily in his clients' commercial environments. -- Terry, East Grinstead, UK Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
t.s.lim Posted May 19, 2011 Author Report Share Posted May 19, 2011 I use XP Pro. I'd broadly echo Paul's summary. On the plus side, some great features, like meaningfully-named variables. But too many bugs and design flaws, performance issues, and inexplicable crashes far more often than I used to get with ME3. I'm surprised to hear from Cory that it apparently runs regular tasks satisfactorily in his clients' commercial environments. -- Terry, East Grinstead, UK I have it tried. It is quite buggy (not due to conversion problem)... sigh! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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