Recently I bought a Dell Inspiron E1505 Core 2 Duo T5600, 2GB RAM, 256MB NVIDIA Ge Force Go 7400 laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium pre-installed on it. Pretty fast and beautiful interface of Vista. Lot of pre-installed trial softwares from Dell which I didn’t request. Had to uninstall all of them to save some space on Hard drive. Anyways, after a couple of hours I was good to go and now it was time to personalize my new laptop.
I installed couple of freewares like Google Earth, Picasa, Yahoo Messenger, Live Messenger & obviously Skype. Till then everything is all clean all good.
Then I made a horrible mistake, I installed Microsoft Office Professional 2007 with Business Contact Manager which I got free as a gift on attending Microsoft event at Detroit, “Ready for a New Day : Launch 2007″. Since then my laptop has become slow like dead. Other Office components works very good like Word, Power Point, Excel & Publisher etc. But Outlook 2007 is horrible slow. It is killing all my system resources. I tried to find a solution on Microsoft but in vein.
Microsoft doesn’t even recognize it as an issue and in near future no patch or service pack will be available for this issue.
To be frank, there are like tens of thousands of people out there complaining about the same problem: Outlook 2007 sluggish performance.
Issue 1: When I try to click somewhere on Outlook 2007, the cursor is just busy somewhere.
Issue 2: I am not able to move mails from one folder to other, the process is unacceptably slow.
Issue 3: My entire system starts to slow down, the CPU usage increases from 5% to 80-90%. So every $%$%ing activity take hell lot of time.
There are lot of forums where people are experiencing the same problem, but no one knows any solution. But somewhere I found a quick fix which might work to make Outlook 2007 faster till Microsoft provides any patch.

Solution 1:

  • Click Start
  • Type Outlook in the Search Bar
  • Hold Shift and right click on Outlook in search results choose “Run as administrator…”
  • When Outlook opens, click Tools/Trust Center
  • Choose “add ins” at the bottom of the page.
  • The one that is causing the issue is just called “outlook addin”. This addin is installed for Cyberlink if you have Media Center so that you can view your contacts and mail without booting Windows. Uninstall this add-in.
  • Then close and re-open Outlook to test it.
  • You might have to try a few different add-ins to find the one thats your problem.

Solution 2:

Part of the issue comes from upgrading from Outlook 2003 or earlier because Outlook 2007 uses your account settings to create new ones for you. When you upgrade to 2007 you will need to locate four .DAT files and rename them…
STEP 1:
Turn off Outlook 2007 and Locate these files For some reason, during the upgrade these four files can become corrupted - the migration from 2003 to 2007 isn’t the smoothest but not having to create all your POP3 accounts again is excellent.

  1. extend.dat – you will find this file in the location | C:\Documents and Settings\user-directory\LocalSettings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\extend.dat. Change it to extend.old
  2. views.dat – may not find it most of the time
  3. frmcache.dat – Drive Letter:\Documents and Settings\user-directory\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\FORMS\FRMCACHE.DAT //change it to FRMCACHE.old
  4. outcmd.dat – C:\Documents and Settings\user-directory\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outcmd.dat. Change it to OUTCMD.old

STEP 2:
Restart Outlook 2007 and send yourself some test emails and watch the messages appear.

Solution 3:

Solution for Hanging Send/Receive – Applicable to Vista

  • Go to Programs ->Accessories
  • Right Click command line and select run as administrator.
  • At the prompt type netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable

For now my problem is solved, I will look forward for some early patch from Microsoft addressing this issue.

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