May 19th, 2008Our company recently moved from Lotus Notes over to Outlook 2007. While Outlook is better than Notes 5 (my God, Notes 5 came out in 1999, what took the company so long?), there are a number of things that stink about Outlook 2007. First and foremost is that it hangs when checking mail on the Exchange Server. I use a dual-core Lenovo T60 — a fast machine. But when Outlook polls the server, it hangs my computer for anywhere from seconds to minutes. I’m looking into what could be causing this lag, but according to Computerworld, I’m not the only one frustrated by Outlook’s performance. I uninstalled Xobni (which, despite my initial enthusiasm, turned out to be not much more than Outlook eye candy), but the problems persist. I don’t have Instant Search enabled in Outlook, so the hanging isn’t being caused by Outlook indexing my email. It’s just slow to check and syncronize with the server. Interestingly the lightweight Outlook web client I use (under Firefox) is snappy. But I shouldn’t be forced to use a web client from my desk at work. I long for Thunderbird, or even Microsoft without Exchange - that worked fine.
On a sidenote, I recently discovered how to fix something that has been bugging me for about a month in Outlook 2007: the prompt at the top of my inbox that asks me to install Instant Search. It got so irritating that I finally gave in and installed it, only to uninstall it about a day later. (Google Desktop search is so much better.) But then Outlook continued to prompt me to install Instant Search again.
Here’s how to remove that annoying prompt.
In Outlook 2007, go to Tools>Options, and click on the “Other” tab. Under “General”, click on the “Advanced Options” button. On the subsequent pop-up window, about halfway down, there’s a checkbox that says “Show prompts to enable instant search”. Uncheck it.
Whew, doesn’t that feel better?
