Speed Up Microsoft Outlook 2007

Outlook 2007 is a dog and there are lots of reasons for this, not all of them Microsoft’s fault. Unfortunately, you’re probably stuck with it. Even the most staunch Office 2003 users have been forced into upgrades.

The issues are obvious. Outlook will slowly load and seem to hang more as your mail volume increases. Normal navigation will become more difficult due to delays. Sending, composing…everything becomes a chore.

There are some quick fixes that can help optimize Outlook. The first one easily has the most dramatic effect. What you do is disable some unneeded add-ins in the Trust Center. To do this:

• The Trust Center is on the Tools menu. Look for Add-ins on the left and click it.
• The screenshot to the left should resemble your window. Click on the Go button, as COM Add-ins should already be selected.
• You’ll see a list of the currently enabled add-ins. Some may be third-party spam filters and antivirus programs, but other than that you should really only need the Microsoft Search or Windows Indexing add-in. Don’t worry, if you end up needing some of these back on, you can always come back and reenable them.

If you’re using a PST and it gets on the larger side , you may have seen a recurring notice about your Personal Folders file not being closed properly. Outlook will check them for problems, but performance is wildly affected. Microsoft may have set the size limit set at 20GB, but things get weird before you get close to that. The only really effective method is to create multiple PSTs and break up some of your stored mail. Critical to this, though, is that you compact the original Personal Folder from when you are done.

One last tip. If you use Microsoft’s Desktop Search, you can turn off the Instant Search. And if you’re not using it, you’ll want to disable that annoying prompt to turn it on.