Brian Edwards
Feb 10th, 2007

Beware Outlook 2007

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Like most people in communications, and in fact business in general, I spend a lot of time writing, sending or reading email each day. The application of choice over the last 10 or so years has been Microsoft Outlook.  It has its flaws but overall I like it, and have always moved to the new version when it became available. Each new version has been an improvement, so I was excited to see what was new in Outlook 2007 and installed the beta.

Overall, I liked the beta but noticed that everytime Outlook checked for new mail on a POP account, my computer would slow significantly, almost to the point of not being usable.  I chalked that up to beta software, figuring that the problem would be solved in production versions.  I’ve just recently moved to the official released version and, if anything, the problem is worse.  If I were on a slow computer or had a slow Internet connection, I could see this.  However, I have a modern dual-core CPU and 1 GB of RAM, so that’s not really this issue.  I also have Outlook 2007 running on a Vista computer, and while the problem isn’t quite as bad on Vista, it’s still there.

I’ve checked a lot of threads, and a lot of people are having this problem, and so far, there doesn’t seem to be a solution. If you are thinking about an “upgrade” to Office 2007, my suggestion is to wait until Microsoft posts a fix to the Outlook slowness problem.  It’s very difficult to be productive with your computer essentially locking up for 30 seconds or so every time there’s new mail to be downloaded.  This is a huge bug and very disappointing from a company like Microsoft.

As an aside, I’ve done a lot of work for Microsoft and have a ton of resepect for them. I’m confident they will get the problem fixed, and overall Outlook 2007 is a step forward in usability and convenience. For for now, beware the upgrade.

5 Responses to “Beware Outlook 2007”

  1. # Michael Affrontion 18 Apr 2007 at 12:50 pm

    Hi Brian,

    My name is Michael Affronti and I’m a Program Manager over here on the Outlook team.

    I just wanted to let you and your subscribers know about a performance update we’ve released that addresses many of the problems you and others have been encountering.

    I’ve posted details about it in my blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_affronti), as well as our team blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/willkennedy/).

    You can directly download the patch from our Download Center here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C262BCFD-1E09-49B6-9003-C4C47539DF66&displaylang=en.

    I encourage everyone to try out the patch if they are encountering these types of performance issues.

    Thanks!

  2. # Brian Edwardson 26 Apr 2007 at 9:44 am

    Thank you for the information and making this available. I installed the patch and it does seem to help. Here’s what I’ve observed:

    - Outlook starts up a lot faster
    - There is still some slowdown when mail is being checked, but it’s not a complete freeze like before.
    - Patch seemed to help more on my Windows XP system than on the Vista system.

    Overall, with this patch, performance crosses the threshold of being acceptable, but please keep working on it.

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