Comments on: Why I Hate Microsoft Outlook

By: John

John — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:52:48 +0000

I see this a lot. If it takes 7 minutes for Outlook to open it may be because you have a huge mailbox. Try putting some of that mail in a PST and it should speed up. It takes less that 10 seconds for Outlook to open on my machine and I get hundreds of emails every day. Keeping your Inbox clean makes it run smoothly. Also, if you have cached exchange mode turned on, you may want to turn that off if you have an alternate junk mail filter. Another thing you may want to do (if you must run in cached mode) is run scanost.exe to correct and corruption in the OST file. If that doesn't work. Turn off cached mode, shut down Outlook, delete the OST and restart Outlook with cached mode turned on. This will rebuild the cache and things should run faster. Just some suggestions from someone who's been supporting Outlook for 7 years.

By: Shannon Thurston

Shannon Thurston — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:15:13 +0000

We have had this type of problem as well. It turns out that there are a few things you can do. If your exchange server is authenticating with NTLM and the settings in Outlook are set to “basic” then Outlook will fail at authenticating every time you start the program. Then, after a long delay, Outlook tries another form of authentication, until finally it gets it right. Try changing the type of authentication in the account settings; that has changed a 7 minute start up to under a minute.

By: ROM

ROM — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:43:49 +0000

7 minutes and you can't do anything else? What exactly is your definition of a fast machine? My notebook is only running a 2.2 core 2 and I have quite a few other things running when I fire up outlook and don't have this issue. As far as productivity is concerned is there any other single application you can be logged into that handles multiple e-mail accounts, calendar, notes, tasks, contacts and rss feed? And, be able to syc all of these to your WinMo smartphone too? I use all of these both for work and personal life. I'd be open to an alternative if there was one but as of yet have not found it.