Overall, Office 2007 is soooo much better than 2003 that it's hard do even do it justice. (Let's just say that my kids might have to mow lawns and get summer jobs in order to go to college now - instead of relying on the constant stream of quarters and dollar-bills accompanying the swearing that I used to have to resort to get anything done with Office 2003.)

But one thing I've noticed over the past few days, is that EVEN though my HD is quiet, I've noticed that I'll be happily working away on my machine (deep in thought - meaning my music is typically off), and I'll hear my HD just start chugging away. Over the past few days it has actually gotten me trained - like one of Pavlov's dogs, to know that my machine is busy receiving email. Which is pretty sad, for a couple of reasons:

1) Performance, obviously. To try and do a better job of getting things done, my accounts now only check for new mails every 10 minutes (instead of the 2 I had them set for a few months ago). But still.. even with spam at all time high levels, I'm just not GETTING enough email to really cause as much HD activity as I'm hearing.

2) The other reason that sucks, of course, is that it really points out how much of a nerd I am. I mean, really, who pays that much attention to the intricate workings of their machine? (And remember, my HD is really very quiet). But hey, if Smaug the Dragon could sense if ANY of his vast treasure had moved, why shouldn't I be able to tell when a rogue process is starting up on my box, or when something is using too much IO? (Or did I just bury myself even deeper into the depths of nerd-dom?)

But anyhow, the reason I mention this, is because it looks like fellow Geek James Shaw also noticed some perf issues. Hell, he's so much of a nerd he did performance tests just to prove himself right. pffffffbbbbbt. But then he received a worrying correction, which lead to an article discussing poor .PST performance with Outlook 2007. This little tidbit is what caused me to blog (well, the truth is that it gave me an excuse to procrastinate, but you get the point) about my own experiences:

I’d also like to know whether Microsoft is just stating the obvious here (bigger file, more disk access); or whether there is some exponential increase in disk writes, suggesting a design fault in the software. I have already noticed that if you show the I/O columns in Task Manager’s performance tab, Outlook 2007 shows some extraordinarily large numbers. [emphasis added]

See? That sure sounds like another geek has SEEN the extra HD activity that now has me trained like a dog at the ringing of a bell. (Don't worry, I don't get any saliva on my keyboard.) Still, I'm inclined to think that the I/O perf is just worse - mostly because my .PST is only 400MB or so in size since I archive just about everything every 2-3 months.

Yeah, probably time that I got back to work. But for the record: I'm trusting my inner geek and betting that SP1 for Office 2007 adds a perf fix for the IO problem...