Windows Media Sharing issues with Vista and Windows 7

As great as the newer versions of Windows are, sometimes we run across really strange issues that cause huge performance issues.  Once such issue has arisen with Windows Media Sharing.

By default, in both Windows Vista and 7, Windows Media Sharing will share out folders like your Music, Pictures, and Videos folders so that trusted people on your network can access them.  Sounds great, right?  Well, it is, unless it accidentally gets configured wrong.  Then it’s a performance sapping vampire that has an insatiable thirst for your CPU and Memory.

Have no fear though, we’ve seen this problem enough and the solution is actually pretty simple.  In Windows Media Player, there is a Library menu (in Vista)  or Organize menu (in Windows 7) that allows you to change what folders are ‘looked at’ for each category of music, video, etc.  Sometimes, usually by accident, folders such as C:\ and D:\ get added to one of those categories.  This causes huge issues as Windows Media Player automatically looks through all of the folders listed and indexes the contents for easy retreival later.  Each time a file changes in the folders being ‘looked at’ the indexer goes back and makes note.

On the C:\ (and sometimes D:\ folders, there usually exists a file called pagefile.sys.  I won’t go into long explanations about this file, but it has to do with memory management for the system.  Anyway, this file is changing, literally _all_ of the time.  So, if a folder containing a file such as this gets indexed, the indexer will never actually ‘finish’.  This causes it to consume massive amounts of CPU power and memory, sometimes bringing the machine to a literal halt!

But wait, you don’t have to throw the computer out the window!  All you have to do to fix the problem is remove the C:\ or D:\ folder listings from the Pictures, Video, and/or Music folders that the entries are in, and *poof* problem solved!  Of course, if you don’t want to mess with it, you can bring the machine into UNI Computers and we can get it done as well!

UNI Computers, we find the really weird fixes so you don’t have to