Is Outlook 2007 better at handling ........

[stevenjf]

........a large amount of existing information ( emails , calanders , etc )
built up over years than outlook 2003 ?
My current personal folders amount to 10 GB of data and my Outlook 2003 is
running slowly .
Does anyone have a view on this and whether 2007 is much better all round
than 2003 ?
Any ways of speeding things up ? I have already archived everything over 2
years old .
Thanks
Steve

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

You don't mention what your operating system and hardware is, but it might
be possible that Office/Outlook 2007 SP1 with the February 2009 cumulative
updates might give you a bit better response. However, there are many
factors that impact performance. Some of these things are...

1) Indexing mail (Windows Search 4.0, Google Desktop Search, .etc)

2) Security software (Antivirus, Antispam, .etc that protect data)

2a) This includes doing real-time scanning of your PST/OST file(s).
Recommend excluding PST, OST, and OAB file types

3) Rotation speed of hard drive (4200 vs 5400 vs 7200 vs 10000 rpm)

4) Fragmentation of hard drive

If you can keep the count in the core folders (Inbox, Calendar, Sent Items)
fairly low, start times improve and the only hit you take is when switching
to folders that have thousands of items or more in them.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

With the pre-SP2 rollup update, the performance of Outlook 2007 increased
significantly.
See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961752

How large is your main pst-file?
Do you leave your archives attached to Outlook or do you disconnect them
when not using them?

What are the specifications of the hard disk that you use to store your
pst-files on?

 

[stevenjf]

Thanks for your response neo .

Apologies for not being clearer but i am using Outlook 2003 which is running
slowly and hanging quite possibly due to the large amount of data i have in
it ( 10 GB ) and i am trying to find out if 2007 deals with this better .

I am archiving from 2 years ago .

Re your points :

1 . i am runnning XP Pro 2002 fully patched ( SP 3 ) and updated with a
pentium 4 2.6 Ghz processor with 3 Gb of RAM.

2 . I use copernic to desktop search which i find is very good and much less
intrusive and far more efficient than Windows or Google Desktop search

2. I dont understand your 2a point unfortunately as i am not the most IT
knowledgeable but not a ludite ! Please explain

3. I dont know what speed my HDD's spin at , how do i establish this ?

4 i am not fragmented and use O&O every week or two

Please advise further ....

Many thanks

Steve

 

[stevenjf]

Hi Roady

Thanks for your advice

I am using Outlook 2003 currently which is hanging probably due to the large
amount of data in it ( pst=10Gb currently ) and wonder if a shift to Outllok
2007 would be better .

I am not certain but i believe i archive into the same pst as my main data
and so leave them attached i suppose , how do i sort this ? I need to keep
all my data to hand for searching however ( by Copernic mainly )

Please advise how to provide you with the specs of the HDD .

I am using XP Pro fully patched SP 3 with a P4 2.6 Ghz processor and 3 Gb
RAM .

My HDD is 279 Gb with 57 Gb free which i had fitted a few years ago . I have
checked properties under Device Manager and it doesnt seem to have a name and
so would you advise how i check its specs . It says its a ST3300831A

Many thanks

Steve

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

I saw your response to Roady, you have a Seagate Barracuda 300GB IDE drive
that spins at 7200rpm

As for 2a. Most antivirus software lets you omit or exclude certain file
types from being checked to see if they contain a virus. What I
recommending is that you check to see if your security software will allow
you to exclude the 3 file types I mentioned. The reason why is that the
data in a PST/OST is encrypted by default (and not to mention the fact you
have a 10GB file), there is a performance hit because the file has to be
looked at by the security software before Outlook does its thing. Excluding
these file types should not impair the security software scanning e-mail if
said solution includes an Outlook add-in or does something called POP3
scanning.

 

[stevenjf]

Many thanks once again Neo and Roady

I am using AVG but cant see in this program where i can do what you ask with
the exceptions . Any help here ?

Also i have just changed the archiving from 2 years to 1 year and the
outlook pst file sizes have increased to 9.96 Gb for the archive data file
and remained the same ( i think ) for the ordinary file of 6.692 Gb which is
odd . ie the normal one hasnt decreased in size ?

When i check the folder size ( inc subfolders ) in outlook itself by
clicking on personal folders ( all folders ) and then properties , its only
saying that its 3.726 Gb which is strange isnt it ? The Archive folder size
is 9.5 Gb

I havent rebooted in between all this but i would have thought by archiving
more the size of my main Outlook file would have gone down rather than just
the archiving going up or am i missing something .

Many thanks as ever

Steve

 

[Roady [MVP]]

A thing you could try is to start Outlook or even Windows in Safe Mode and
see if you are still experiencing poor performance. If so, then you are
indeed reaching the limit of Outlook for your hardware configuration. That
is quite likely as your hard drive is PATA 100 which is quite slow for a
10GB database (a pst-file is a database).

I doubt that you need all of the 10GB of data on a daily basis. I'd
recommend to split your pst-file into 2 or more pst-files. For your hard
disk, it would be better to keep your pst-files below the 5GB.
You can create an additional pst-file via File-> New-> Outlook Data File...

After moving the data, make sure you compact the original pst-file;
http://www.msoutlook.info/question/81

To answer your original question; yes, Outlook 2007 with the mentioned
update will increase performance over Outlook 2003. It holds additional
indexing tables making displaying of large folders a lot quicker and changes
at what time Outlook commits the changes to the pst-file, making it less
likely that a disk read and write occur at the same time and thus increases
responsiveness.

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

Roady covers what it takes to compact a PST after you remove a lot of data
from it to reclaim hard drive space. To go a bit deeper, Outlook will never
automatically shrink a file. Think of a PST kinda like an Access database
file where you end up with a empty space where the data used to be but the
overall size of the .mdb stays the same. This empty space is what we call
white space and will be reused by new data coming in. The net result is
supposed to less input/output to the device based on use/archival patterns.

Not sure what version of AVG you use, but I found this on their support
forum site that shows how to exclude a directory in version 8. Perhaps
excluding file types is somewhere in the same area.

http://free.avg.com/faq.num-1239#faq_1239

If you have to exclude by path rather than extension (since some posts
mention that the exclude by extension doesn't work), exclude the
directory/directories where you store your .PST file(s).