The Outook team quietly slipped out a hotfix for Outlook 2007 containing quite a few major performance enhancements. Dubbed the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update, the KB 961752 patch fixes over 100 individual bugs.
The Outlook team has revised their mailbox/OST size guidelines too, welcome news to anyone using cached Exchange mode. Before installing the 961752 patch if your OST was larger than about 1GB Outlook's performance would start to suffer. The new OST guidelines say:
- Up to 5 gigabytes (GB): This size should provide a good user experience on most hardware.
- Between 5 GB and 10 GB: This size is typically hardware dependent. Therefore, if you have a fast hard disk and much RAM, your experience will be better. However, slower hard drives, such as drives that are typically found on portable computers or early generation solid state drives (SSDs), experience some application pauses when the drives respond.
- More than 10 GB: This size is where short pauses begin to occur on most hardware.
- Very large, such as 25 GB or larger: This size increases the frequency of the short pauses, especially while you are downloading new e-mail. Alternatively, you can use Send/Receive groups to manually sync your mail.
Prior to the Outlook 2007 SP1 February 2009 cumulative update if you had more than 10,000 items in a single folder you'd experience performance issues. After the February update you can usually have around 50,000 items in a folder before experiencing the same issues.
Apparently all cumulative updates for Office are only released as hotfixes, which means it won't be showing up in Windows Update anytime soon (until it's officially released as part of Office/Outlook 2007 SP2). To download it you need to request a link from Microsoft (it's easy), or you can download the KB961752 patch from Mediafire directly.
Read more about the patch on the Exchange Team's blog or at the descriptively titled "Outlook 2007 improvements in the February 2009 cumulative update" KB 968009 page.
January 17th, 2010 at 6:01 pm
Whenever I launch Outlook I get BITS entries being queued up (I can see one appear using bitsadmin.exe /list every time I click Send/Receive in Outlook 2007).
My Outlook connects to three email accounts. Two of them are with a local PST file, and the third is an Exchange connection (accessed over a VPN).
Any suggestions?
(The BITS entries look like below:)
C:\Users\Owner>bitsadmin /list
BITSADMIN version 3.0 [ 7.0.6001 ]
BITS administration utility.
(C) Copyright 2000-2006 Microsoft Corp.
{43D05E0F-318D-4BD0-8687-8B05185F7D3C} 'Microsoft Outlook Offline Address Book'
TRANSIENT_ERROR 0 / 1 0 / UNKNOWN
{F0EF7C0B-4359-41BE-A149-F783586D5B69} 'Microsoft Outlook Offline Address Book'
TRANSIENT_ERROR 0 / 1 0 / UNKNOWN
{F799AAAC-62F1-4A37-AF87-27E76725FF46} 'Microsoft Outlook Offline Address Book'
TRANSIENT_ERROR 0 / 1 0 / UNKNOWN
{5B4A8215-34B6-4A62-9C00-CFDA401D1557} 'Microsoft Outlook Offline Address Book'
CONNECTING 0 / 1 0 / UNKNOWN
{96F41CEB-9042-4533-BEAA-A5ECBED3D7E1} 'Microsoft Outlook Offline Address Book'
QUEUED 0 / 1 0 / UNKNOWN
Listed 5 job(s).