Major Mediadirect Problem!!!

So my notebook came with "Cyberlink" Mediadirect 3, the new one with Instant Office (contacts, presentations and such)...

Major problem.

I install a fresh copy of outlook on my machine (newly formatted xp), import my old .pst file, and low and behold, I have CPU spikes of 30-40% constantly happening, making one core of my M1210 completely bogged down!

I looked under task manager to see Outlook.exe and Explorer.exe were the culprits... so I thought, what is Outlook doing?

I used filemon.exe by a company called sysinternals to check to see and Outlook was constantly accessing my .pst file. At first I thought it was Outlook 2007 indexing... so I installed Outlook 2003 instead, same problem.

I then looked more carefully, at the start of each CPU spike, Outlook was looking at c:\mdt\mediadirect\outlook contact and c:\mdt\mediadirect\outlook calendar.

So then I went on to delete all my outlook contacts and calendar entries, and my cpu usage at each spike was down to 5% or so. Theres my culprit!

I then proceeded to c:\program files\dell\mediadirect\Oladdin\ and ran the setup in there, its for a program called Cyberlink OutlookAddin, and from I can tell, it is what looks at Outlook and collects the contact and calender info for Mediadirect.

The problem is that it does this every 3-5 seconds, and uses ALOT of CPU, if you have 40-50 contacts and a jam packed calender, well, there goes your computer (as long as outlook is running).

Anyhow, im still investigating but getting rid of the program by running the setup/uninstaller seems to fix this.

Comments? Anyone else with MD3 having this problem? (when outlook is open check task manager for a spike in outlook CPU usage every few seconds, also check the files in c:\mdt\mediadirect\outlook...\ to see if they are being accessed all the time.

 

I just got off the phone with Dell support about the same problem. They told me to uninstall MediaDirect until they come out with a patch at Dell Support next week... After uninstalling, my Inspiron is functioning at full bore again -- no CPU spikes.

Chris

 

If you just run C:\Program Files\Dell\MediaDirect\OLAddin\OLAddin.msi and Remove the Outlook Addin, that gets rid of the problem without totally uninstalling MediaDirect 3.