I used to really enjoy Outlook. However, since moving to Office 2007, I am ready to find an alternate mail reader or revert back to Outlook 2003. I find that Outlook routinely spikes in memory usage, brings my system to a halt while performing a Send and Receive, takes forever when I attempt to organize my mail folders, ... I am not along as others have reported similar problems with Outlook 2007. We all have tried to hone our usage of the product (keep the pst size to a minimum by moving all achievable items to separate psts, make efficient use of Rules, ...), but those steps are only a loosely fashioned band aid and only have a minimal impact on the overall product performance. I believe that Microsoft is aware of the issues, but I have yet to see anything from them on how they are going to fix the problems.
I was very excited to get the added functionality from IE 7 (mainly tabbed browsing), but became very remiss once I realized what impact it has on system resources. If more than a few tabs are open, and God forbid you have multiple instances of IE open as well, then it starts to consume a fair amount of memory and becomes sluggish.
It's been a while since I have done a refresh on my workstation, so I will soon embark on a small project to restructure my hard disk configuration and install everything again from a clean slate. This new configuration will be something like: C: Just the operating system (SCSI, no RAID), D: Just Program Files (SCSI, no RAID), E: Pagefile (SCSI, no RAID), F: User data (SCSI, hardware RAID w/Parity).
I am hoping this will clear things up a bit, but if not, I'll revert back to Outlook 2003 (or another email client) and might switch to another browser that is not just an overlay on top of IE.
Published Saturday, April 07, 2007 9:42 PM by dthomson
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