Another entry in the Why Using Windows Media Player 9 for Six Months was a Honking Great Waste of Time and Effort series.
Performance
At first, WMP9 didn't seem to be too much of a hog. It started up reasonably quickly, and most operations were fast enough to cause no annoyance. But over time, either my growing media library has affected it adversely or my tolerance has changed, and it's come to act like a complete dog.
A rescan of my mp3 directory for the media library (to add new files or clean out old ones) now takes minutes and locks out all access to the controls of the player while this occurs. Hard disk access seems particularly excessive when the process involves removing deleted files from the media library, as if it's searching my entire hard drive to locate the missing files before finally conceding that yes, I've intentionally deleted them. Any operation involving the media library has an unacceptable response time attached to it. And when, in mid-play, I try to skip to the next track, I have to listen to a couple of seconds of repeating, stuttering music -- why did they let it do this? (There's no crossfader on my version of WMP... a rant for another day.)
I have an Athlon 900 machine. I just want to play some mp3s. Is this really a task that ought to bring my computer to its knees?
It would have been nice if you'd done a "previously on Trioptimum" for those who had missed part 1.
Although this idea may just be funnier in my head. Yes I think that's more probable.
I'm too tired to write anything funny here, so I'd be grateful if you would just laugh now and close the browser before you have a chance to see exctly how much of a mess-of-English this paragraph is.
(LAUGH NOW)
(LEAVE)