Speed up Outlook 2007 when Outlook 2007 is slow!

Outlook 2007 seems to be a little slower than Outlook 2003. To speed up Outlook 2007, here are some tips. Give it a try, it won’t slow Outlook 2007 down more than that it is now 🙂

For all the steps: Open your Outlook 2007 as an administrator. If you’re logged in as a normal user, run Outlook as an administrator, or log off and logon as admin again

Hints and tips:

1. Disable all the addins that you don’t use. To do this:
   1. Go to Tools, then Trust Center, then Addins.
   2. Disable all the addins that you don’t use. I disabled all addins, just because I only use the default features. You may leave the Indexing enabled.
2. Remove the RSS feeds from the default send/receive configuration. To do this:
   1. Go Tools -> Options -> Mail Setup -> Send Receive.
   2. Select the All Accounts group, and click the Edit button.
   3. Click on the RSS account and you will be shown a check box at the top of the tab page allowing you to include or exclude this account as part of this send/receive group.
   4. Uncheck the Include RSS Feeds in this Send/Receive group. What this will do though, is never sync up your RSS feeds until you manually tell outlook to do so.
   5. Click OK, Close, OK, Close, and so on, until all windows are closed 🙂
3. Install the latest ServicePack. At this moment, the latest SP is SP1
4. Turn off calendar caching. If you have Exchange in use then Outlook 2007 may well have the caching of people’s calendars turned on. This means that when you open a calendar you have to wait for the cache to populate, which can slow things down a bit sometimes. To do this:
   1. Go to the Tools Menu and select Account Settings
   2. Select your Exchange Account and press the change button
   3. Press the more settings button
   4. Select the 2nd tab (Advanced)
   5. Un-tick the “Download shared folders” option. Note that this will stop cached Sharepoint folders from downloading into Outlook as well.
   6. Press OK until all options are saved.
5. Clean up your Inbox from time to time. Loading a PST, containing 4000 items, can take up a lot of performance. By splitting up your Main PST into several smaller PST’s, and excluding the data files at startup, Outlook 2007 loads much faster!