Outlook 2007, Media Direct and terrible performance

I made it my mission this morning to figure out why the performance of
Outlook 2007 was SO bad on my M2010. Bad as in "almost impossible to
use".

I started with the Vista Performance Monitor and noticed that a huge
amount of disk activity was from Dell MediaDirect to a temporary file
named "outlook contact.tmp".

Now common sense asks "what does Media Direct have to do with Outlook"?

Sorry, can't answer that question. Makes no sense to me.

First step was to fire up MediaDirect to see if I could disable it at
startup. Don't use it, can't see that I will ever use it, but hate to
uninstall it as the first step.

Since this was the first time I've run the program (after owning the
computer for months), it asked if I wanted to check for updates. Why yes
I did!

Ran the update and, so far, all the performance issues are completely
gone.

Did some Google searches and this appears to be a common, and fatal,
problem.

This also explains why others that are running Outlook 2007 on a Desktop
or a laptop without Media direct aren't seeing the problem.

As an example, typing this email would have been arduous. It would have
had at least a dozen times where it pauses for 10-15 seconds with no
characters appearing.

This time, not one pause, and the hard drive light is barely blinking.

Thanks Dell for delivering well tested code.

Tom

Tom,

Can you share what you discover -

Outllook 2007 is much slower on my Dimension 8200


"Tom Scales" wrote in message
news:34E319369116466CADF9B66B6B5CB8CB@M2010...
I made it my mission this morning to figure out why the performance of
Outlook 2007 was SO bad on my M2010. Bad as in "almost impossible to
use".

I started with the Vista Performance Monitor and noticed that a huge
amount of disk activity was from Dell MediaDirect to a temporary file
named "outlook contact.tmp".

Now common sense asks "what does Media Direct have to do with Outlook"?

Sorry, can't answer that question. Makes no sense to me.

First step was to fire up MediaDirect to see if I could disable it at
startup. Don't use it, can't see that I will ever use it, but hate to
uninstall it as the first step.

Since this was the first time I've run the program (after owning the
computer for months), it asked if I wanted to check for updates. Why yes
I did!

Ran the update and, so far, all the performance issues are completely
gone.

Did some Google searches and this appears to be a common, and fatal,
problem.

This also explains why others that are running Outlook 2007 on a Desktop
or a laptop without Media direct aren't seeing the problem.

As an example, typing this email would have been arduous. It would have
had at least a dozen times where it pauses for 10-15 seconds with no
characters appearing.

This time, not one pause, and the hard drive light is barely blinking.

Thanks Dell for delivering well tested code.

Tom