outlook 2007 slow as hell

I don’t know what’s happening at Microsoft, are they losing all the good programmers to ‘cooler’ companies or something because everything they’ve brought out in the last while has been crap. Installed the new Office and they completely changed the interface for Word and Excel to make it simpler. i.e. for fucking idiots who couldn’t use a basic piece of software like a word processor. After a many a Google I managed to find where they stashed away all the useful features.

But Outlook: what the hell is going on. I tried importing my 2gb pst file and it was going dirt slow. Can’t blame it, it’s a big file so i left it overnight. It had barely got a quarter of the way in the morning. It was importing an email every 2 seconds! With about 100,000 emails it would take a while. So I split up the .pst files into 200meg chunks and only loaded 3 at a time. 600 megs of pst files, surely it can handle that?

Nope. Flicking through emails slows the whole thing down no end. This is on a new comp with 4gb RAM and a dual core at 2.4ghz. You can’t search emails with any useful criteria until installing an addon called Microsoft Search Companion which is like Google Desktop only it hogs about 4 times the resources. Every now and then with Outlook not open the system would slow to a crawl when this thing would start indexing. So I uninstalled that.

And send receive… is just unusable. It starts off lively and then just… halts. Computer completely unusable until this finishes. Hard drive whirring like it’s processing terabytes, mouse barely moving. It takes about 5 minutes to download 10 emails. Loads of people with similiar problems as me, businesses who spent 20 grand on Outlook for an entire company.