Microsoft releases patch for Outlook 2007, speed boost promised

We’ve been complaining, we’ve been trying to do what we can to improve things (including disabling most fun plugins), but Outlook 2007 has been dogged with performance problems since it debuted (actually in complaints started in beta).  Microsoft has finally released a patch for Outlook 2007 that is supposed improve the performance issues:

Microsoft indicated that the problem stemmed from RSS feeds, email, and calendar files all being stored in the same .PSD file which as one might imagine could grow in size rather quickly depending on the user. The problem lies not with the software, but how users are using the software. Jessica Arnold Outlooks Program Manager told ComputerWorld “Outlook wasn’t designed to be a file dump, it was meant to be a communications tool…There is that fine line, but we don’t necessarily want to optimize the software for people that store their e-mail in the same .PST file for ten years.”
Source: Microsoft speeds up Outlook 2007 – Download Squad

Vista’s Windows Update didn’t flag it for me today, so I downloaded it manually.  Have I noticed anything different?  Not really.  But it is Saturday and e-mailing hasn’t been high on my list of activities today.

In the quote above, it is important to note that they are right.  Keeping a ton of e-mail, especially old e-mail and calendar items, is pointless.  I let auto-archive run and do its thing every month.  Copernic indexes the archived e-mails so nothing it lost.

Also don’t forget to compact the mailbox periodically.  I’ll cover that in another post later.