Users are reporting that Outlook 2007 is slow – much slower than Outlook 2003, which it is meant to replace.
Experiences vary, but the worst affected are those with large mailboxes. Large in this context means thousands of messages and several GB size. Looking at the newsgroups there may be a particular problem with Outlook on 64-bit Windows. I’m not impressed; though it’s not yet clear how widespread the problem is. I’d be interested in comments.
Confession time: I have a huge mailbox. That means I can easily find old email correspondence, and that’s a feature I value. Furthermore, I lack the time or patience to sift through and delete what is no longer required. Unfortunately, the most effective advice for those suffering from slow Outlook 2007 installations seems to be: reduce the size of your mailbox.
While there may be good organizational reasons for doing this, it seems odd that it is needed on today’s machines, with vast amounts of RAM and disk space, and unspeakably fast CPUs. And if you use Exchange, be sure that you archive to a server location, otherwise you can end up with several little archives littered over every machine you use, and they likely will not be backed up.
Why should users have to prune their mailbox because the very latest Outlook cannot cope with it as well as the older version? Surely it is not that difficult to query and display emails from a local database?
I’m also disappointed that, for all the talk of user experience, the new Outlook does not slow down gracefully. You know the kind of thing: you start the application and an unresponsive, semi-painted window appears for a while. You click to change folders and the application appears to hang. You click to drop-down a menu and the application freezes for several seconds. Isn’t this the kind of thing that background threads are meant to help with?
As for RSS, I can’t make sense of what Outlook 2007’s designers were aiming at here. Note that I think the RSS central store, installed with IE7, is a great idea. However, “central store” in this context means central to the local machine. What Outlook seems to do is to copy the contents of this store to your mailbox and then keep it synchronized. I think that’s a mistake: mailboxes are big enough already, and Outlook would do better to query the central store dynamically.
The real problem comes when you use Outlook with Exchange. Many users take advantage of the server-side mailboxes in Exchange by using Outlook on several different machines, all pointing to the same Exchange mailbox. For me, this is the primary advantage of Exchange and Outlook. But what if those several different machines have different RSS feeds in their central store, or even the same ones?
So far, it appears that Outlook cannot cope. I end up with duplicate feeds, I end up with feeds showing in the RSS feeds folder that are not listed in Tools – Account Settings – RSS Feeds; in fact this list is empty on my desktop machine, Sync is turned off, but I still have a ton of feeds in the Outlook RSS feeds folder.
It seems simple to me. Either Outlook’s RSS integration should be 100% local, in which case you just see what is in the central store on your current machine. Or it should be 100% server-based, in which case Exchange should handle the RSS updates. Mixing the two is just silly.
Tip for improving Outlook performance: if you are happy to do this, go into Tools – Account settings – Microsoft Exchange Server – Change – More settings – Security, and remove the checkbox from “Encrypt data between Outlook and Exchange”. Other factors may be search engine integration (Microsoft’s or other), A/V integration, or other add-ins.
Bottom line: I suggest caution before rolling this out over a network.
Update: other tips you can try
A few other things that have helped people:
- Exchange users: Remove Outlook 2003 and do a clean install of Outlook 2007, making sure that a new offline store is created from scratch.
- Run on Vista.
- Turn off indexing. Tools – Options – Search options – uncheck all folders. It’s a shame to do this as the indexed search is useful.
- Let indexing complete. Might be worth leaving the machine running overnight.
- Reduce the size of your mailbox (of course).
The above will not solve all the problems, but can mitigate performance issues.
Further update
Microsoft has posted some official workarounds. See here for comment and link
Technorati tags: outlook, office 2007, outlook 2007, performance, rss
I just got a new Dell Laptop loaded with Vista and Ooutlook 07. Everything works fine except for Outlook 07. When I attempt to type a message there is a long and I mean a long delay from when you type to when the letters appear on the email. And then it is like the curser does not work as when you click on it nothing happens – you have to wait for ever. I thought something was wrong with my mouse until I noticed this did not happen if I was surfing the net.
I do not have a large mailbox. I am a personal user and this happended when my mailbox was empty. I have been on two long calls with Dell and they just told me there was no way to fix this and referred me to this blog as proof. They are going to allow me to return my laptop.
Is there a way to just take off Outlook 07 and put the most recent version on and keep my laptop? The technicians at Dell did not speak very good English and I am not very computer literate but it seems a shame to return a laptop when there is just a problem with the email software.
I am happy (well not really) to see that I am not alone. I have a fairly awesome dual P4 Xeon 2.6 ghz workstation I built a year ago with 3.5 GB ram 5 300 GB SATA2 drives and I had to turn off automatic send/receive just to use the computer. I hit send/receive manually when I am leaving the computer. I had a 1.6 GB PST. I also keep my previous year’s pst (700MB) open for quick access to email info and I always show 1.5GB free ram but almost anything in O7 makes me think i am back on my 90mhz Pentium computer from 1994. Microsoft has never taken such a giant step backward as they did here. I really need the emails because many of my customers contact me once or twice a year and expect me to know what they got on the last order and it was great to be able to have that info at my finger tips. Now it would be faster to print them out and thumb through a filing cabinet!
Hopefully someone who cares at MS (oops – that is kind of an oxymoron) might read the frustrations they have caused and maybe they can compile the code and make it run faster. This runs like a program that is trying to compile on the fly.
I have read the comments and empathize. I have a customer who had Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003. After upgrading and some clean installs of Office 2007 on all XP Pro PCs, Outlook 2007 is grudgingly slow. This is with small or large Exchange mailboxes. It can take 15 seconds for Outlook 2007 to even open with a small mailbox. I have followed all the suggestions here and more. I have been in touch with Microsoft Private Newsgroups and have been getting advice. None of it has helped to resolve the issue so far. But I can share what I have learned with some surprising results:
1) Outlook 2007 with Exchange Caching mode on makes a big difference, but it is still slow.
2) If I start Outlook 2007 and click on File-Work Offline, it speeds up to Outlook 2003 speeds! This implies Exchange 2003 connection issues.
3) If I remove the Exchange mailbox from Outlook 2007 and work completely with a new (yes, that means very tiny) .pst file, then it moves at Outlook 2003 speeds – ie. instant response. This also implies Exchange 2003 connection problems.
My questions to the people using Exchange are:
Have you tried working offline to see if this affects your speed?
Have you tried using Outlook without an exchange mailbox to see if this affects the speed?
The people telling of Outlook 2007 problems related to Exchange, PLEASE TELL US WHAT VERSION OF EXCHANGE YOU ARE USING. Is anyone using Exchange 2007 with these slowdown issues? Perhaps that takes care of the issues?
The microsoft tech told me that Exchange 2007 is meant to work with Outlook 2007 better, so this may be a partial solution.
Wow, am I glad I found this page!
Outlook 2007 had been grinding away for about 8 hours and was virtually non-responsive and completely unusable. I disabled the CyberLink OutlookAddin and now Outlook 2007 acts like a real email program again!
For what it’s worth, I do have a Dell, but did not buy Office to be installed on the box (I get my copy and license from work). Nonetheless it still had the OutlookAddin installed.
Also, I am starting with no PST file … I haven’t copied that over yet. And I am connected to an Exchange server (sorry, don’t know what version). I’ll see what happens when I copy my PST over from my old box.
Roger,
Thanks for your input. Can you call tech support and find out what version of Exchange they are using?
Also, are you using Vista or XP on your Dell? Thanks!
specifics – Exchange 2003 as server (very large enterprise)
Laptop with XPsp2, Office 2007
Desktop with Vista, Office 2007
PST exists on desktop and I pull the pst from desktop to laptop daily. It is about 90meg.
Watching Sue Mosher’s site (slipstick.com), this site and a few others plus MS’s kb stuff; http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=932086 for one and other kb info (use google to search kb’s)
My biggest issues –
#1 – the To, CC, BCC lines; if I type something and I want to go back and change it hangs for a few moments to several moments (15 secs is FOREVER)
#2 – Plugins not working…to many to note, so I’d like to find (looking now) a place that states what each plugin I have does.
Ok, haters. M$ has finally released a patch for the “slowness” problem in Outlook 2007.
Update for Outlook 2007 (KB933493)
Brief Description
This update fixes a problem in which a calendar item that is marked as private is opened if it is found by using the Search Desktop feature. The update also fixes performance issues that occur when you work with items in a large .pst file or .ost file.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c262bcfd-1e09-49b6-9003-c4c47539df66&DisplayLang=en
Now go back under the bridge and be quiet. 🙂
BoiseGuy,
Plugins were causing my problems on the Outlook 2007 clients. I removed SpamBayes (which worked with Outlook 2003 and prior) and it sped things up well into the acceptable level.
What I also did not tell everyone was that I set up a Terminal Server on Server 2003 with Exchange Server on it as well. This is not supported by MS, although it works well. However, when I upgraded to Outlook 2007 from 2003, the speed became gruesome. It takes 15 seconds or more just to start Outlook. It takes a long time to move between Mail to Calendar. Actually anything to Calendar is very slow. Since this configuration is not supported, there is no MS help. The customer’s only options are to drop back to Office 2003 on the Terminal Server or live with the speed problem. They have chosen to live with the speed problem.
That Outlook 2007 update may work for desktops, but it does not fix the problem they have on the Terminal Server. I tested it and it does not fix the problem because on a TS there is no .OST or .PST file being used – it is forced to be ONLY a direct Exchange 2003 mailbox connection.
Corey
My Word 2007 slows down to a halt when I try open file types from earlier versions ( .doc ) It goes into computability mode but it takes about 3 minutes just to open the file due to it not being a .docX file. This is bull shit if they are changing the file type at least make it faster to open older files not slower. Furthermore, 90% of the population will be using those older formats so now your going to have to save your files twice.
And yes Outlook 2007 goes to a halt also when I send / Receive.
Hello. I am a Program Manager on the Outlook team at Microsoft. I saw this post discussing the performance issues you’ve seen in Outlook 2007 and I wanted to let you and your readers know that we’ve released an update designed to improve performance in Outlook 2007, especially for large mail stores.
You can read more details about the update in this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/willkennedy/
Here is a direct link to the download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C262BCFD-1E09-49B6-9003-C4C47539DF66&displaylang=en
Thanks for your support.
– Jared Brown [MSFT]
This patch has helped – hangs of 20-30 seconds have been reduced to hangs of 2-3 seconds, which is certainly an improvement. Hopefully the next patch will get it to the speed I got used to in 2003.
I’m running a Dell laptop and was ready to jump from a window after I upgraded to Outlook 2007. It slowed down everything – not just Outlook. Many programs stopped working properly. Finally I found your site and saw the posts about Media Direct. I uninstalled it via the control panel and voila! Everything – including Outlook 2007 – is working like a dream.
I also have a Dell laptop,running Vista, and found Outlook 2007 painfully slow. I have spent a whole day talking to Microsoft changing various parameters to no avail. Then saw the post about Media Direct, uninstalled it, and now Outlook runs absolutely fine. I have applied all the latest updates from Microsoft and my .pst file is about 1GB.
I’ve tried all the fixes that are mentioned above and my outlook is at most 10% of the speed that I used to get with the 2003 version. Yes, I have tried the patch from microsoft (post 135) which does nothing. Disabled all the add-ins and RSS feeds as well as started using it in safe mode to no avail.
The sad part is that the only reason I bought office 2007 was because of Outlook, and my trust for the older version. After 6 hours of tinkering around, I gave up last night and downgraded.
I have to commend MS for one thing though, the downgrade went without any hiccups. Everything restored to its original state. Maybe it was expected….
I think I am going to stick with OL’2003 until MS can re-assure everyone with a big patch that fixes this bug.
My setup: OL’07 on XP on a T43 Thinkpad with 1Gb of pst file.
I also had outlook being almost unuseable slow. Deleteing mediaconnect from control-panel -> software fixed it.
Now its doable but still unstable. Hangs for a few seconds sometimes
Since installing the patch outlook functions fine (it has completely fixed the slowness issue) BUT now the Index search will not work, it no longer indexes emails in outlook and I rebuilt the file to try to get it working again and not only has it not fixed the problem it removed all the previous indexed emails and now can find nothing when doing any search within outlook. This is one of the major new features of Vistaa/Office 2007 effectively disabled by installing the patch.
Well I have a brand new Toshiba laptop, Vista Ultimate, and trial of Office 2007. No large pst file size as brand new POP3.
Diagnostics detect no problem, Internet speed is fine.
Can’t even download one small POP3 message, it downloads at about 10 BYTES per minute max!
I tried to install the patch but Windows Genuine test fails (details show it passes for Office 2007 pro but fails for a non-existant Home and student edition (which I don’t have), so I can’t even istall the patch!
Disabling McAffy doesn’t help.
Update to above, I found that I could access SOME pop servers OK but not earthlink’s which was rediculously slow. I then tried a direct PC to DSL modem connection and found I could access earthlink’s pop server just fine, but another ISP that had been fast behind the router became rediculously slow.
I tried the Mike Bisson netsh fix (see posting 104) and it cured all.
This may also explain problems I had had accessing some websites (such as microsoft, adobe) when others worked very well (in fact a speedtest logged me at 9.8MBytes / second).
My new Dell laptop had very slow OL 2007, and after reading many posts, I did the Dell recommended fix of removing Outlook Addins Setup (Cyberlink) in control panel/remove programs.
OL 2007 is much faster now.
I went into Tools , Instant Search, Search Options, and unchecked my folder, and Instant Search pane on selected folder only.
I was waiting 2-5 minutes for my 4GB .pst to respond to the check for new email, and of course, found this thread, and others and found the Vista desktop search (instantaneous) is not a good thing for email since junk email and other forms of incoming email do not need to be immediately indexed.
my previous post made my email perform so much faster…
good luck all.
andy
reno, nv
All, well I was having a huge problem with the POP. I went to my POP server (Mercury) and forwarded all my mail to a G-Mail account, setup the G-Mail account to ‘enable pop’, setup Outlook 2007 to pull it down from the G-mail and it works smooth!!!!
So, is there a problem with ALL POP accounts or just some? I am sending out through the POP (Mercury) server and pulling down through POP (G-Mail)……
I fixed my performance problems on Outlook 2007 by changing the server timeout. I use Pop. The timeout was 30 seconds, I set it to 10 minutes.
Suddenly Outlook 2007 runs as fast as outlook 2003.
Still having other “vista” problems… but this is finally usable.
Writing email in Outlook 07 is driving me mad.
It will randomly freeze up completely while composing email and I’ll have to restart Outlook. It was suggested that I disable automatic “send/receives” but to no avail.
I have both exchange and pop email accounts.
I’ve tried all the fixes, and Outlook 2007 is still making my stomach churn daily. I have tried all the suggestions, and Microsoft’s fix on two machines (both my own). Both are Vista. One has 2 gigs of RAM, the other 1. One dual core P4, the other single core. Outlook is periodically usable, but regularly slows to the point where it will not respond. Before the MS fix, Outlook was regularly using 80% or more CPU time. After the “fix” it will regularly spike to around 50-60%. I have found to continue working at these times that I can go to Task Manager and lower the Outlook.exe process priority to low which allows me to at least work in other apps while Outlook is busy. This CPU usage usually lasts about half an hour, and will recur periodically all day. Eventually, Outlook starts responding again. I am running against Exchange 2003 and open two mailboxes on the server using RPC on HTTP.