Daily Archives: December 29, 2006

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System impact of Outlook 2007

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Back in November I blogged about the slow performance of Outlook 2007 (the comments are worth reading too), following up with another post about how it seemed to slow down the whole system.

I’ve now got more evidence of this:

Note that this is on Vista, which has proved substantially better for Outlook 2007 than XP. You might think there is nothing very exceptional about Outlook.exe grabbing nearly 40% of the CPU time, but consider the context:

I took this screenshot while troubleshooting another problem. Interesting point: I had not opened Outlook since the last reboot. Msconfig does not show it as a startup app either. Maybe this is some Office pre-loading trickery; or more likely it has been started by Vista’s desktop search engine. Yet this is meant not to interfere with your work.

RSS sync in Outlook is turned off.

Outlook isn’t grabbing this CPU all the time, but in regular brief bursts.

I’d like to know what it is doing.

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blogging, internet

What you’re reading

The new year beckons, so here’s a quick look back at my web stats.

I’m surprised by the most popular search phrase. Believe it or not, it’s vb.net database. I wrote a short article on getting started with a vb.net database app. This was in .NET 1.1 days. My presumption was that when you fire up VB.NET with the intention of writing a simple database application, it is not particularly obvious how to go about it. I wasn’t altogether happy with the piece; yet the number of hits suggests that this is indeed a common source of puzzlement.

Next up is dreamweaver 9. Back in June I picked up some information about the next version of Adobe’s web design tool. There’s clearly keen interest out there.

Other bit hits are .net mac (are you listening Microsoft?), htmleditor (looking for this) and wpfe, attracting more interest now that the CTP is out (here’s the interview on the subject).

The list in full:

  1. vb.net database
  2. dreamweaver 9
  3. jbuilder
  4. htmleditor
  5. .net mac
  6. private bytes
  7. tablet pc
  8. wpfe
  9. sqlite delphi
  10. msi editor

What about pages retrieved? At the top is the blog, of course, with twice as many hits to the blog home page than there are RSS retrievals. When you consider that each RSS subscriber typically creates several hits per day, that’s surprising.

Here are the other most read articles:

  1. The htmleditor phorum, now a useful archive of information on mshtml, and the c# htmleditor download page.
  2. Why does my dot net app use so much memory? – lot of people shocked to see what Task Manager is telling them 
  3. Wrestling with the Windows installer – reflecting your frustrations with MSI
  4. Notes on Sqlite – out of date now
  5. ipodphoto.php – also out of date, though I gather these older iPods are sought-after for things like the firewire port and according to some, superior audio quality
  6. wpfe.php – as mentioned above 
  7. Sqlite wrapper for Delphi
  8. Running .NET on a Mac – very out of date, but reflects the interest in this subject 
  9. VB.NET Database sample as mentioned above 
  10. Why Microsoft froze VB 6.0 – a subject of enduring interest

Other points of interest:

Browsers: 79% Windows but only 60% Internet Explorer, 14% Firefox. I reckon the figures are distorted somewhat by bots that awstats is failing to detect.

Search engines: 93% Google. 2.1% MSN, 1.6% Yahoo. This is not only an indicator of Google’s market dominance. For some reason Google tends to rank pages on this site higher than the other search engines. This makes a big difference to the hits.

How many visits? Around 1 million, from 250,000 unique visitors.

Finally, tons of spambots, mostly trying to post comments, but some just trying to get into referral stats (as far as I can tell). It is a huge and offensive problem. Very little muck actually gets posted, but some of it gets into the stats, so don’t take the figures above too seriously.

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apple, multimedia

The backward march of iPod/MP3 devices

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I was astonished to read of how the iLink dock brings digital output to iPod – at a price of $2000 or so. Nearly three years ago I purchased an iRiver H140 for around the same cost as an iPod, but with additional features including built-in digital i/o, mic input with adjustable gain, and direct recording to either MP3 or lossless WAV. I still use the device today – it’s ideal for recording interviews as well as portable music – but when it wears out it may not be easy to replace. Even today, most devices lack these audiophile features or provide them only through expensive and inconvenient add-ons. Lossless recording and digital i/o are hard to find anywhere. Even iRiver’s own range has gone backwards, with nothing comparable currently available.

I’m not sure of all reasons for this, but a big factor is Apple. The dominant iPod may be great on usability and small size, but rich features don’t fit with Apple’s minimalist philosophy. You might think that would give an opportunity to other vendors, but in many cases they seem content to follow rather than innovate.

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