I also find Outlook (2002) annoyingly slow and I don't use Outlook for
e-mail at all (from the threads I've read, e-mail seems to be the
feature that is the focus on most performance-improvement suggestions).

I use Outlook as a Calendar, a task manager, and as a contacts manager
(but I have less than 1000 contacts), my Outlook Deleted Items folder
is empty). I don't access any servers with Outlook (at least not
intentionally). It's running on a 3GHz Pentium with 1.5 GB of RAM, so
I doubt the problem is hardware limitations.

Can any of you suggest non-email-related things for me to check/do?


Lanwench [MVP - Exchange] wrote:
In oups.com,
rich47 typed:
I have used Outlook for a number of years and currently have Outlook
XP (I think it's 2002) on my computer. I have a large amount of
messages stored on my machine (more than 2 gb).

More than one PST file, then, right? (OLXP/2002 has a 2GB limit on PST
files, and you will likely run into problems closer to 1.3 / 1.5 GB)

I like Outlook's functions, but it runs very slow. It wasn't always
this way. It is slow to open and slow to close (sometimes it doesn't
close at all and when I restart the program it tells me not all the
folders were closed when I last closed the program). Because of this,
I find that I'm using Gmail for my e-mail program and hoping that
Google comes out with a calendar program soon.

However, I'd like to still use Outlook. Can anyone suggest some ways
to make the program run faster? Do I need to delete old messages (I'd
prefer not to), archive them, or do something else?

How many items do you have per folder, on average, when you're seeing this
problem? Don't store a humungous bunch of items in any folder - create
subfolders. MS doesn't recommend more than 5000 items per folder - and
personally, if it were my inbox, I'd have an aneurysm if I saw that many
items as I consider it a "to do" list of sorts).

Other suggestions: Back up your PSTs (do this regularly anyway) and run
scanpst.exe against them. Make multiple PST files for archive purposes. Turn
off Instant Messaging in Outlook (tools options somewhere....).



Thanks.