You may be wondering what these two apps have in common. Well from what I can see not much, but there is one thing - incessant hard disk activity.

For the past week or two I've been running Office 2007 and Windows Media Player 11 on my laptop, a 1.7Ghz Centrino with 1gb RAM. Ever since installing these two apps, my machine has been brought to it's knees, making my email client everything but usable. After a bit of Live searching (yes i've been using Live search too), it seems that the 'instant search' tool that Outlook asks you to install was the cause of the problem.

So I thought about how much I use the search feature in Outlook, and came to the conclusion that I hadn't used it once since install. So out the window it went, and with it some of the file swapping hard disk activity.

But all was not quite right, as even when my computer was idle I could see my HD light flickering away. So I called up Task Manager to see where my processing power was going, and low and behold it was WMP11. Note that at the time, WMP11 was not even running; it was in fact the WMP11 Network service. At the same time as installing Office 2007, I had installed Vista on my desktop which naturally comes with WMP11. I subsequently found out there is some fancy feature which allows you to play MP3s from another computer's media library, automatically sharing across a network. My laptop had found the stream coming from the desktop, and was conversely sharing it's own library back to the desktop. Thus the HD activity.

So now I've disabled the WMP networking feature and all is quiet once again. Outlook 2007 is finally just as usable as 2003 =)