After my first review of Windows Live Writer, I have received a comment fromJoe 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.

 
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.