Microsoft Outlook 2007 Slow Problem Resolved

I’ve been dealing with a slow Outlook 2007 for about a year now. By slow, here’s what I mean: when clicking on Send/Receive, the process takes perhaps 4-5 minutes to download 75 messages totalling about 400k. I have high speed internet, and have spent much time troubleshooting Outlook. My PST file size is 300MB, not large by any means.

Looking online, I found several people touting the virtues of: reducing pst file size, turning off RSS feeds, turning off add-ins, compacting, cleaning, updating service packs, autotuninglevel, safe mode, or turn off indexing, but none of these did anything to help my problem.

What did solve my problem? The skinny answer? Delete Sent Items. I send lots of attachments, mostly pdf documents, or photos. By getting rid of any e-mails in the sent items folder that were larger than 500k, Outlook immediately sped up. Now the approx 75 messages at approximately 400k takes 15 seconds!! That’s a healthy improvement.

Now, I just archive the sent folder once in a while, or I delete sent items with attachments, and outlook is very happy.

Microsoft Office Problem

I recently was having a problem with PowerPoint 2007 running very slowly. A switch from slide to slide in the editing view, would take anywhere from 4-20 seconds. Just typing a word would take 5 seconds per word!  This was getting very annoying.

There are several good suggestions from others in the community about loading a local printer driver, changing graphics hardware acceleration, among other things. Here’s a list:

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Microsoft Office vs Open Office

Is Open Office a viable alternative to Microsoft Office? The short answer is maybe. If you don’t need to share files with anyone else, and you only generate documents for yourself, then Open Office may work for you.
I just recently installed it to get around a Microsoft problem. But unfortunately, it is not compatible with Microsoft Office documents. They claim to read and write Office files, but in reality, it does not work correctly.
If you open a powerpoint file in Open Office Impress (the presentation software), it butchers the PowerPoint, and you’ll have to move every element on every slide around. It also doesn’t support the nice shading that PowerPoint does. Then when you save the file, and open it back up in PPt, everything is messed up.
Same goes for Word and Excel files. Open Office software is great, if you don’t need compatibility with anyone else, or if you don’t want great looking documents, or if you don’t use any other computers that have Microsoft Office loaded. But if you want great looking documents, Microsoft Office is better. The newest version has fantastic drop shadows and the animation is much smoother than Open Office.
If you need to share documents with other people, Microsoft Office is the way to go, since most people already have it. If you need to use other computers that already have Microsoft Office loaded, you don’t want to learn how to use 2 different office suites. All the menus are totally different as well many of the keyboard shortcuts. I really wanted Open Office to work, but the above requirements rule out Open Office. Sometimes you just get what you pay for. Read more