As several users, including yours truly reported, MS Outlook is painfully slooooooow. I especially liked Mini Microsoft’s description:
“You’d think I had just sprayed the inside of my poor mega-laptop with saltwater to induce non-stop fritzing. I’ve learned to meditate while Outlook ruminates over ten incoming POP messages of 69K. Perhaps it takes a few seconds over each incoming message or RSS feed to contribute to solving a Grand Challenge. Or it and Desktop Search have to play 333 iterations of rock-paper-scissors everytime a change has to be written.”
Microsoft recommended solution was to reduce one’s Outlook data file. Apparently few users followed it, so now Microsoft came out with the absolute solution: Windows Live OneCare deletes users outlook.pst file. You know, that’s the unimportant little file where you keep all your email, contacts, appointments, tasks ..etc.
I suppose starting from scratch with an empty data file speeds up Outlook…
This is so pathetic, I don’t really know what to say … Phil Wainewright said it best on ZDNet:
“It’s astonishing that in the midst of a serious challenge from a new generation of Web-native office suites, Microsoft should give its rivals a helping hand by handicapping its own product so badly…”
Amen.
Update (3/10): Deja Vu… MS programs killing MS programs is nothing new…
Maybe Microsoft is trying to reduce support costs by convincing users to switch to Gmail/Google Calendar 🙂 Now that their data files are gone, there’s nothing that ties them to Outlook! Seriously, though. I moved my mail to Google Apps a month ago, and I don’t know why I spent all that time watching Outlook act like it’s downloading a 100MB attachment every time I get a two line plain text message.
I am ready to pull my hair out over my outlook performance…has nothing changed with this regard in the last 153 weeks?? Admittedly, I am still on Outlook 2003. Would updating make a difference or am I just looking for a newer version of the same problem?
Isabel, have you found a good solution to move your old email to gmail, or is it just a “fresh start”?
Funnily enough I thought to turn on the Logging so I could see what was going on and Miraculously Outlook has been performing stellarly! No delays…. I have been working for over 20 minutes without one delay after turning on the logging…
… that trick works!!!
Microsoft OutLook might well not be the problem but your ISP POP3 mailbox
Do you preserve all the mail on the server etc
dont use a decent IMAP service with outlook and everything just works that bit nicer…
POP3 is evil
regards
John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
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