A day or so ago my Outlook 2007 slowed to a crawl when switching from one folder to another. The folder contents and preview screens go blank … pause pause pause … then the contents display. Moving from message to message in the folder isn’t so bad, but there is a momentary pause. Since that delay is slight, I can’t tell if it was there before or not—but the delay in switching folders is definitely new.
Google is returning a slew of hits, but doesn’t seem to order them by date—most results refer to Vista updates and other things from the past few years that haven’t helped or aren’t applicable. The most common solution I’ve seen is to check the .PST file size, but mine is below 2 GB. I’ve also run Spybot and MSE.
The machine is relatively fast—i7 920, 6 GB RAM, SSD, so this issue really stands out.
Has this happened to anyone else? What else is there to do or check?
How big are the folders? As a general rule, smaller files will perform better. And, if (when!) they get corrupted, you’ll lose less mail if one small file goes bad, rather than one huge file.
IIRC, the default max size for a .pst in Outlook 2007 is 20 GB, but 2 GB is the recommended max. Item count is another thing to watch - ideally, you should have fewer than 1000 items in the standard Calendar, Contacts, Deleted Items, Sent Items and Inbox folders.
Now, if any of my users said they had a 2 GB .pst and 1000 messages in their Inbox, I’d send them off to do some cleanup. What Microsoft says is possible is often different than reality.
Try doing a folder compaction - right click the .pst in Outlook, select Properties, Advanced, and Compact Now. This is roughly analogous to doing a disk defrag - it may or may not help, but it won’t hurt.
Size w/o subfolders: 813 MB
Size w/ subfolders: 934 MB
Individual subfolder sizes range from less than 1 MB to +/- 40 MB
Total item count in Inbox (where all the subfolders are): 6120 :eek:
That’s a lot of items. Is there a way I can archive the attachments but keep the message text intact? We work with a lot of bureaucracies and I really do have to go chasing down two, three, four and absurd-year old messages. It’s kind of unpredictable what may be needed.
The odd thing is that there was no recent influx of messages in the past few days. It went from fine to crap in an instant. When things like this happen it’s often an update that needs to be worked around, but if it’s not showing up everywhere else, I’m not sure what it is—but updates are the only changes that were made to the system (no new software has been installed).
What antivirus solution, if any, are you using? Some of them worm their way quite deeply into the inner workings of mail clients - and an unbidden update of an AV engine can suddenly make things work slower (I just ditched AVG for this precise reason).