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I Hate Outlook 2007!

 

I’ll start this by saying that I find Outlook 2007 to be a right royal pain in the ass.  It’s slow, unwiedly and at times proves to be not very useful.

 

I’m forever seeing what I call the "White Screen of Near Death" – this is where you click on the Outlook 2007 UI, nothing appears to happen so you click it again and a white glaze forms over Outlook and it stops responding – (Not Responding) appears in the title bar.  Outlook appears to be dead in the water but if you hang around a bit it usually comes back – I (and I’m sure many others) experience this and find it a real frustration.  "What the hell are you doing?", "I’ve only asked you to open an email?" I’d shout at Outlook day after day.

 

Office 2007 Service Pack 2

 

I was delighted to see that Office 2007 SP2 has been released today and that there were numerous performance fixes in place.  I read on Twitter that 140 Outlook 2007 issues had been addressed – it’s a good start but we’ll probably need SP3 to nail ’em all .

 

So I downloaded office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe and as usual I had the option of saving it or running.  I prefer Save in case of issues with install and I have to redownload it.

 

Laptop Info

 

Here’s the setup of the laptop I am installing SP2 on:

 

 

I was running a VPC with 1500M allocated at the time and didn’t want to stop it before starting this so installation times may have been skewed

 

Installing SP2

 

I double clicked office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe

 

 

Selecting Run

 

 

 

You must accept the MSLT to light the cpntinue button.  Click the co

 

 

 

About 30 – 40 secs on my laptop

 

 

Followed by

 

Reboot Required!

 

 

Aaarrggghhhhh!  I hate having to reboot my laptop when installing s/w – especially when I have stuff like VPC2007 running an image.  So 1 (long) Reboot later….

 

Restarting Outlook 2007

 

I started up Outlook 2007 SP2 and saw this:

 

 

Outlook then stepped through my mailbox/RSS Feeds etc. so depending on how many email, RSS feeds etc. will dictate how long this stage takes – on my laptop it took about 10 minutes to prepare Outlook.

 

 

Subsequent startups of Outlook seemed a lot quicker than before circa 5 seconds but I guess time will tell.

 

Email Functionality

 

In use, emails seemed to snap open rather than drag themselves from the depths of my Inbox.  This seems much quicker than before the SP2 update.  New email presented itself seeimgly quicker also.  Of course, none of this is being measured by scientific means just my gut feeling and it tells me that it’s quicker.

 

Rss Feeds

 

Selecting RSS Feeds appears quicker as does opening RSS posts

 

Calendar

 

Appointments seem to open quicker – Reminders are opened quciker and can be snoozed in a timely manner

 

Tasks

 

More responsive

 

Contacts

 

More responsive

 

 

Deleted Items

 

I had 1037 items in my deleted items box and Outlook cleared these in 2 – 3 seconds – again seems much quicker than before SP2.

 

Experience So Far

 

Outlook appears to have a bit of an overhaul on the performance front.  It seems to startup and shutdown quicker, operations that I’ve tested appear to be quicker/snappier more useable – I like it.

 

Questions Still To Be Answered

 

1. The "White screen of near death" is it still there, does it occur as often?

 

2. CRM Integration – does it still work

 

3. Live Meeting Addin – still work

 

4. Is there an increased memory footprint to Oulook since SP2 – I wish I’d checked this before I installed SP2 = too late now

 

I’ll be finding out the answers to these and other Outlook related questions in the next few days/weeks and I’ll update this post as and when.