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Outlook 2007 - a rant

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johnk:
Does this help the speed issue:
http://www.veign.com/blog/2007/06/fix-sluggishness-of-outlook-2007.html
-Veign (June 05, 2007, 12:36 PM)
--- End quote ---
Veign,

Thanks for the link, but I have already applied the patch, along with many other fixes suggested on various forums. And the patch didn't really help. One of the reasons for the slowness is that the combination of a new database format and the use of Windows Desktop Search for indexing means that there's lot more writing to the hard disk going on all the time as you use Outlook.

I even read one quote from an MS bod who had the nerve to say that the problem was caused by users' large PST files and that "people shouldn't be using it as an archive"! I know what he means, but on the other hand, back when they released Outlook 2003, they boasted about the fact that the PST size limit had gone up from 2GB to 20GB.

My PST is less than 500MB, and it performed fine in Outlook 2003. Outlook 2007 is the problem. I can only presume that everyone at MS uses some form of super-computer and they never, ever see speed issues.

Carol Haynes:
Why? Well, it took some digging to find out, but apparently MS, in its infinite wisdom, decided to stop using the IE HTML engine to render Outlook emails. Now Outlook 2007 uses....MS Word's HTML engine. Really.
-johnk (June 05, 2007, 12:03 PM)
--- End quote ---

The infinite wisdom presumably came from the constant criticism in the past of ActiveX/Java based viruses arriving in emails because of the holes in IE's rendering engine.

Trouble is using Word is just shooting themselves in the foot big time. Maybe someone should suggest Firefox - or allow users to choose the rendering engine. It is, after all, rather reinventing the wheel when most people will have multiple engines installed already!!

Anyway, thanks for the heads up - I wasn't totally convinced about the upgrade to the ribbon interface but this has finally convinced me to leave it at Office 2003 which works fine.

Not sure about PST backward compatibility but Office 2007 comes in various flavours - some of which don't include Outlook 2007. Why not uninstall Outlook 2007 and go back to Outlook 2003 which should coexist quite happily with the other Office 2007 apps.

Before you do it however I would strongly suggest that you export all mail to Outlook Express from every PST file you have opened in Outlook 2007 because I think they changed the PST format between versions and also your contacts (you can import it back in to Outlook 2003 if you need to).

I'm not sure how you could salvage other data types such as tasks, calendar etc. but you may be able to export them in a CSV file or Excel file.

Whatever you do backup your PST files before messing then at  least you can return to Outlook 2007 if you feel it is causing problems.

IIRC when they gave out the public beta and RC1 and 2 of Office 2007 it didn't install Outlook 2007 because of backward compatibility issues.

Veign:
Does this help the speed issue:
http://www.veign.com/blog/2007/06/fix-sluggishness-of-outlook-2007.html
-Veign (June 05, 2007, 12:36 PM)
--- End quote ---
Veign,

Thanks for the link, but I have already applied the patch, along with many other fixes suggested on various forums. And the patch didn't really help. One of the reasons for the slowness is that the combination of a new database format and the use of Windows Desktop Search for indexing means that there's lot more writing to the hard disk going on all the time as you use Outlook.

I even read one quote from an MS bod who had the nerve to say that the problem was caused by users' large PST files and that "people shouldn't be using it as an archive"! I know what he means, but on the other hand, back when they released Outlook 2003, they boasted about the fact that the PST size limit had gone up from 2GB to 20GB.

My PST is less than 500MB, and it performed fine in Outlook 2003. Outlook 2007 is the problem. I can only presume that everyone at MS uses some form of super-computer and they never, ever see speed issues.
-johnk (June 05, 2007, 01:21 PM)
--- End quote ---

Thanx for the followup.  Good to know...

wraith808:
Speaking of .PSTs... I just found out that even 2k3 does some stupid things.  My .PST was 1.5GB, and I decided to split it into a current PST and an archive PST.  I made the archive PST in 2k3 format and it ballooned to 2.6GB(!).  I created a new 2k2 compatible PST and copied everything from the 2k3 one and it went back down to 1.5GB.  That's advancement for you!

CWuestefeld:
The PST format change (allowing larger capacity) came with Outlook 2003. I had 3GB stored under that version, before upgrading to Office 2007. On the other hand, my officemate annually archives into new PST files, so he only has the current year's stuff open.

Both of us suffer from complete freezing of the whole computer when Outlook is downloading mail. That is, other applications like Firefox are affected as well. The effect is bad enough that I've considered abandoning Office 2007.

It definitely seems to be related to the upgrade. Even with huge data files, it didn't happen in 2003, and even with smaller data files, it still happens in 2007.

It feels like a threading issue, where the application is behaving particularly badly and freezing the desktop's UI thread. However, Windows has been immune to this particular problem since (IIRC) Win2K, so that can't be the actual issue. But whatever it is, it sucks.

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