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Windows LiveWriter Beta 2 – DO NOT INSTALL IT!

by @ 7:24 pm on 6/1/2007. Filed under general

Oh my gosh, you have seen the number of blog posts since installing this new version… So I have been using it like crazy, but my gods is it slow. I am SO sick of it pegging my CPU for 20,30,40 seconds at a time and not allowing me to do anything in it or anything else. I am not sure if it is because it is a .NET app or .NET app with an issue. 😉

I like the new look, I like the table support, I like the new spell check features, I love the single window but I do not like hitting whatever it is that LiveWriter gets confused on and then being hung for long periods of time. Hell I added 50,000 users to the ADAM instance on the machine and the CPU hung out at about 35% and that is with the AdMod client AND the ADAM Server both running on the same machine… LiveWriter can’t possible be doing work that requires more CPU than that.

Now another issue, looks like the format that is saves drafts locally in has changed, I have draft posts that I can’t export in any format and since they have pics in them I can’t post them to my blog as draft (the other option) and I was saving them until WordPress was working right again… ARGH!

Rating 3.00 out of 5

6 Responses to “Windows LiveWriter Beta 2 – DO NOT INSTALL IT!”

  1. just use word 2007 for blogging … that’s what i do

  2. Ryan says:

    Weird… it runs great on my laptop.

  3. joe says:

    Don’t know what to say Ryan, but I am not the only one, the LiveWriter blog has a few folks all mentioning the same thing as well as instability.

    I was doing something else and had process monitor up and happened to catch one of the short high proc usage periods of LiveWriter and it was just pounding the registry. Very odd use of the registry looking at what was being asked for, lot of duplicate requests outside the normal queryvalue twice to get the size of the data buffer needed. Open a key, querying a value then closing the key and immediately reopening it again and doing the same thing. Also every 5 seconds they are open and closing hkcu\software\Windows Live Writer\Preferences\PostEditor so they can query hkcu\software\Windows Live Writer\Preferences\PostEditor\AutoSaveDrafts… every 5 seconds… Have they not heard of RegNotifyChangeKeyValue? Actually looking at a lot of the things being queried over and over again, internal value caching that was flushed based on change notification handles would probably help the perf considerably. This app is WAY too registry based. It does not need to be hitting it that hard.

  4. Daniel says:

    I have this installed on three different laptops with three different OS’, no slowing and I also watched the CPU usage. I have posted a couple times on Vista and that is where it was the worst, but nothing to call home about. Sorry for the bad experience, I like this new version, been waiting forever for it.

  5. Tomek says:

    After Your post I’ve intentionaly have looked at Live Writer for some time and I haven’t noticed such behaviour You are describing. Probably there is something specific for some confiugrations.

    But I agree that the way it is using registry You’ve described is not a best way to go.

  6. Flora (MSFT) says:

    Hi Joe,

    I am a member of the Writer team at Microsoft. Thanks for trying out our product, and I’m sorry to hear that you’ve been experiencing problems. We’ve had reports of svchost.exe taking up 100% CPU when Writer is running, and this appears to be a Windows auto update problem. If this is what you’re seeing, you can go to Services in control panel (or run services.msc) and find the Windows Live Setup Service. Change it from Manual to Disabled, and the problem should go away.

    If this isn’t what is causing Writer to eat up your CPU, feel free to drop me a line at t-florag*AT*microsoft*DOT*com and we’ll do our best to work with you to find out what’s causing the problem.

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