MS Outlook taking forever to start

[Lawlaw]

I've just switched to MS Outlook 2000 from Outlook Express to handle my emails and task/contact manager. But Outlook takes forever to start on my P-M 1.4G notebook...sometimes as long as 10 mins before I can get to see what's in my inbox.

Two things that I can think of:

1. I'm using Outlook with two POP3 accounts. Not sure if Outlook is designed to work better with Exchange servers in mind.

2. I have about anywhere from 3000-4000 emails in all the folders combined. Does that has anything to do with the slow startup?

Any help would be appreciated.

[The PIT]

Won't help I can't remember the limit when Outlook gets grouchy. Why try Thunderbird which also help prevent you from getting virus.

Just had another thought which virus checker are you using??

[Rob(QG)]

The two things that I have found make it slow to open are:
Preview pane switched on - if the most recent email happens to be a big one it will take ages to show it.
Corrupted offline folders file.

[The PIT]

I know Mcafee virus checker ver 7.xx can make grind to crawl if mime checking is enabled.

[Mcollector]

Get a better mail client than Lookout or Lookout Express. Try Eudora, Thunderbird or Mozilla.

[High_Jumbllama]

At work we use the same with up to 4 pop accounts and some people have over 10 thousand emails. It is finicky at times but usually due to the antivrus program. Now if I could just get the bosses to organize their email.

[DGhost]

Outlook works well here. I would say the number of emails probably makes it crawl, especially when running on a laptop hdd. try compacting folders or using the archive feature - just be careful as if you are not careful you can loose emails that way.

3000-4000 emails will make *anything* crawl.

[Lawlaw]

When I was using Express everything worked fine. It's not nearly as slow as what I'm experiencing now.

I'm running Network Associates Virus Scan Enterprise 7.0. Just disabled the email scan and see how things go.

I was going to compact the folders but just found out the option doesn't exist??? It's weird cuz I remember seeing it on my old desktop (which they took away after giving me the notebook).

[Jammrock]

There are typically three causes of a slow Outlook startup:

1) Too many items in the default folder (commonly Inbox). Outlook caches the information of each folder the first time it is accessed during a session, so if there are several thousand emails to cache in a single folder it will cause it to 'stall' while caching. This is why Outlook 2003 has a nifty little pop-up that says "System is working, please wait" when accessing large folders.

2) A huge PST file. The PST file is the single storage location for all Outlook folders (unless you create multiple PST files and split the load). For pre-Outlook 2003 PST files, the file size limit is 2 GB. For Outlook 2003 PST files (and with Outlook 2003 you can use either a 97/2000 PST or a 2003 PST) the file size limit is >20 GB. Here's the major problem with PST file ... they get fragmented to all hell! I've seen near 2 GB PST files that were in 7k-9k fragments. If you have big PST file the ONLY way to keep it contiguous and running fast is to slap it on a seperate hard drive that only contains PST files, or its own partition. When I do this for clients I take 2-5 GB free space and mount the volume to a directory, so they don't think, "Hey, I've 2 GB to store Word docs over on the E: drive," and undo the entire reason for having the PST on its own space.

3) Corrupt PST. Because of the size of the PST file they tend to end up on bad sectors. When this occurs, and a folder is access (like the Inbox) which has messages on a bad block it will cause Outlook to stall, or stop responding all together. If the PST itself is corrupt (happens a lot) Outlook 2002 SP-3 and Outlook 2003 can self repair it, otherwise you need to get the "PST repair tool" from Microsoft.

Hope that helps.

Jammrock

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Lawlaw
When I was using Express everything worked fine. It's not nearly as slow as what I'm experiencing now.

I'm running Network Associates Virus Scan Enterprise 7.0. Just disabled the email scan and see how things go.

I was going to compact the folders but just found out the option doesn't exist??? It's weird cuz I remember seeing it on my old desktop (which they took away after giving me the notebook).

We've got enterprise at work and that certainly in some cases causes problems with email programs. The other comments on this thread are also valid.

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Lawlaw
When I was using Express everything worked fine. It's not nearly as slow as what I'm experiencing now.

I'm running Network Associates Virus Scan Enterprise 7.0. Just disabled the email scan and see how things go.

I was going to compact the folders but just found out the option doesn't exist??? It's weird cuz I remember seeing it on my old desktop (which they took away after giving me the notebook).

try to find the scanpst.exe and scanost.exe proggies from MS. they should be somewhere on your hdd, or they're on the Office CD.

Scanpst is for PST files, scanost is for the "online/offline" file.

They will check your files for any problem and propose to fix them (if any is found).

You can also compact the pst files manually.

[Goc]

I've seen the behaviour you're talking about many times at work. Could you check if Instant Messaging is enabled in Tools/Options/Other?