Office 2007 on WinXP slowed everything to a crawl

[M Skabialka]

A friend has a PC using WinXP that is about 4 years old. She recently put
Office 2007 on and says that the entire machine runs very slowly since,
especially Outlook 2007.
I had her run defrag, chkdsk, clear her Internet cache, run her antivirus,
but still everything is slow. There is plenty of free space on her hard
drvie, and he has 2 GB RAM.

What else should she try?

 

[BillW50]

In M Skabialka typed on Tue, 4 Aug 2009 08:53:31 -0500:

A friend has a PC using WinXP that is about 4 years old. She
recently put Office 2007 on and says that the entire machine runs
very slowly since, especially Outlook 2007.
I had her run defrag, chkdsk, clear her Internet cache, run her
antivirus, but still everything is slow. There is plenty of free
space on her hard drvie, and he has 2 GB RAM.

What else should she try?

Those things rarely help in solving the problem. And the first thing I
would do is to run the Task Manager (or MS free "Process Explorer" which
is better anyway) and see what is eating all of the CPU time. Just the
other day I installed Sun's Java and Java's Quick Start (jqs.exe) was
eating enormous amount of CPU time on this netbook. No problem, kill the
process and I renamed "jqs.exe" to something else like
"jqs.exe.disabled". Now all is well again.

 

[HeyBub]

A friend has a PC using WinXP that is about 4 years old. She
recently put Office 2007 on and says that the entire machine runs
very slowly since, especially Outlook 2007.
I had her run defrag, chkdsk, clear her Internet cache, run her
antivirus, but still everything is slow. There is plenty of free
space on her hard drvie, and he has 2 GB RAM.

What else should she try?

Did she get Office 2007 from a dodgy vendor?

If so, it might contain something other than Office 2007.

 

[Anteaus]

Does one actually need Java Quick Start?

Not that I'm aware of. For that matter, only a tiny proportion of websites
use Java. It's pretty rare to find a need for it at all, outside of Sun
products.

Does it do anything useful?

Supposedly makes Java start faster on the very few occasions it's actually
needed, by preloading into memory.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Did she upgrade from an old version of outlook? If so, what version?
Did she install all the latest updates, including SP2?
Did she make a new profile?

See http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/ol2007/slow.htm

 

[M Skabialka]

It was purchased through the MS Home User program - it is genuine.