Windows Live Writer Review - Round Two
Review, Technology June 7th, 2007After my first review of Windows Live Writer, I have received a comment from Joe Cheng [MSFT] about my review. Joe Cheng is a developer of Windows Live Writer from Microsoft. So I decided to give it a second review.
Joe Cheng gave me some hints and tricks about the Live Writer.
Me: For example, for File upload, I cannot really use it since I can?t upload images to my wordpress upload directory.
Joe Cheng: This could be due to a PHP bug that we?ve seen on some configurations. Writer generally works fine when uploading images to WordPress. E-mail me and I can help you get to the bottom of this.
PS. The quote function in Live Writer is kind neat. I like it.
Me: And I don?t even have clue about comment policy, and author field. There is no such field in the editor for me to enter my name.
Joe Cheng: Comment policy and author are available at the bottom of the screen. Next to ?Set Categories? and ?Set Publish Date? there?s a little up-arrow, which reveals more post options.
Ah. Now I know where to put my slug, comments permission, author information and excerpt and trackbacks URL. I was not aware of the Up-arrow. It should be more obviously. Now I am also able to add and modify my categories on the fly or just reload my categories from my WordPress blog. Nice!
Me: However, the quality for resizing doesn?t seem good enough. It?s getting really blurry.
Joe Cheng: Yes, we have an image processing bug that?s causing that. It will be fixed in the next release.
Well. I will include some image and try the upload features. There was an permission issues with my WordPress. There is no write permission to the folder for upload. I have changed the permission and image should be uploaded this time.
Me: However, when I have more than two windows opened the same time, and with real-time spell check enabled, my CUP usage is going crazy. It slows down my entire PC. I close all of the running application and still get 70% CPU usage and 94MB memory usage.
Joe Cheng: That must be a bug?we have never seen that before. Unless the CPU usage is coming from svchost.exe, not WindowsLiveWriter.exe. If it?s the former, the workaround is to go into services control panel and disable the Windows Live Setup Service. If it?s the latter, can you please e-mail me?
Yes. The CUP usage is 98% by svchost.exe. The svchost.exe is using 90% of the CPU when I start the Live Writer. Now it drop down to 0%. If I trying to type something or doing preview, it bump up to 90% again.
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I manually turn Windows Live Setup Service off in the services (manual). I got a warning from TrendMicro saying some system configuration is changed. Well. WLSetupSvc.exe automatically starts after I reboot my pc.
When I look at the Task Manager. WOW. I found that Live Writer is using 68MB memory. That is a lot of memory.
OK. While I am typing this blog. I check the HTML source code. It’s adding a bunch of style code into the image tag. All of the border options like this. style=”border-top-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px” I guess that is how they construct the drop shadow. Well. There is no option for me to just set normal border (1px solid #000000) like BlogDesk did. Or I will have to rely on WordPress template style sheet.
So what is my conclusion?
I feel better this time. I just don’t like the CPU usage. I can live with the images upload and image quality.
One thing worth to mention is the capability to link back to my previous post by clicking on the “Link To” when insert a hyper link. I can choose from my previous post on my local disk or on my WordPress blog at real time. That is a nice feature. It save my time.
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7 Responses to “Windows Live Writer Review - Round Two”
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June 7th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Sorry for not being clear, I did not mean for you to merely stop the Windows Live Setup Service but to change the Startup Type to Disabled. At this time there are no negative side-effects to doing so, although note that if you install/uninstall another Windows Live application it might cause the service to re-enable itself, in which case you need to go back in and disable it again.
The update service situation is kind of a mess and we’re doing our best to make sure it gets fixed in the future.
We are kind of a memory hog (although 70MB is higher than I would expect)–partially this is due to us being a .NET application, we don’t have as much control over that as we would like. But keep in mind that the memory manager in Windows is designed to optimize the working set size of each process based on usage patterns; in other words, if you’re not actually using Writer and start running short of memory, Windows will be smart enough to swap it out and hand the memory over to other processes. That’s not to excuse us for being a memory hog, just to point out that determining the actual impact an application has on your available memory is not as simple as looking in Task Manager.
June 7th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Cheng:
Thank you so much again. I sort of figure out to disable the service.
I am surprise that this post has been viewed 96+ times after I post it. I definitely appreciate your hard working on this. Can’t wait to see the final products.
June 8th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Hey Joe just to let you guys Know I think Live is the best blogging tool currently Available. One the features that rocks is the syncing with the drafts which already have on my wordpress blog its a really big time saver. I have no complains at all expect for the XHTML validation. I found a work around for it instead of publishing my Posts directly through WLW I post it as a draft then publish it using the worpdress editor. The editor strips out all the invalid code
June 8th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Arpit:
Thanks! That is very good point. I have not tried to post draft to wordpress. I should do that too, because I always go into WordPress to customize my description and keyword fields.
Thank you for stopping by!
June 8th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Then you’ll love the “Post Draft and Edit Online” command. You can get to it either from the File menu, or by clicking the down-arrow on the Save Draft toolbar button.
June 10th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
[…] meta tag for keywords and description from now on for every post. Start getting used to with Windows Live Writer, I will just post the draft to the server and edit the keywords and description […]
June 28th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
[…] Since I start using the new Windows Live Writer as my offline blog editor, I have not had any issues. I have post few reviews about this awesome Free software that made my blogging life easier. Windows Live Writer Review - Round Two. […]