{"id":235,"date":"2004-05-10T21:56:30","date_gmt":"2004-05-11T01:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/supercharge_your_outlook_performance"},"modified":"2004-05-10T21:56:30","modified_gmt":"2004-05-11T01:56:30","slug":"supercharge_your_outlook_performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2004\/05\/supercharge_your_outlook_performance.html","title":{"rendered":"Supercharge Your Outlook Performance!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My new desktop at work has finally arrived. Out with the old Dell, in with the new. The new machine has twice the memory and about four times the processor speed of the old machine. Presumably it plays Quake <em>really<\/em> well.<sup>[<a href=\"10-1\">1<\/a>]<\/sup> However, its most salient benefits are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It reboots really, really fast.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s actually pretty quiet. <em>Outstanding.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So after several days of blood, sweat, and more than a few tears, all my applications are loaded and working properly&#8230; with the curious exception of <a href=\"http:\/\/www-306.ibm.com\/software\/awdtools\/clearcase\/\" title=\"uber source code repository\">ClearCase<\/a>, which still refuses to read the main Engineering Documents <acronym title=\"Versioned Object Base\">VOB<\/acronym>. Fortunately, it&#8217;s not like my job depends on reading engineering specs.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, the application that gave me the most trouble was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/outlook\" title=\"Outlook hazy, try again\">Outlook<\/a>. Displaying a message was taking over three seconds, as compared to, oh, 30 milliseconds on my old, &#8220;obsolete&#8221; machine. We soon determined that A) it was a client-side problem, and B) uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook and Office didn&#8217;t help.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, before the IT guys got a chance to take stronger measures, I found the solution.  Poking around in the settings, I discovered that the checkbox next to &#8220;Enable Instant Messaging in Outlook&#8221; was checked. That setting looked weird to me, so I unchecked it and restarted Outlook. Lo and behold, Outlook was fast again!  I checked the box, restarted, and yes, Outlook was slow again.  Unchecked, fast again.  I {heart} reproducible errors.  So, to sum up: if you want Outlook to run fast, uncheck that Instant Messaging box. I suppose having <a href=\"http:\/\/spacelink.nasa.gov\/NASA.Projects\/Human.Exploration.and.Development.of.Space\/Human.Space.Flight\/Shuttle\/Shuttle.Frequently.Asked.Questions\/Second.Generation.Computers.FAQ\" title=\"Ionizing radiation, ionizing schmadiation\">three orders of magnitude more RAM than the computers on the Space Shuttle<\/a> probably wouldn&#8217;t hurt either.<\/p>\n<p>So while my apps are working okay now, I am still struggling to restore my environment to a usable state. Outlook is particularly obnoxious, as its preferences are scattered throughout at least several screens. It took me about five months to tweak it into shape the last time around. I should note that the IT guys <em>did<\/em> mention that I could migrate all my preferences and documents in one step.  However, they claimed this would involve generating a gigantic multi-gigabyte file, and any registry cruft in my old profile would get loaded right along with all the useful stuff. The clean install sounded a lot better after that. <\/p>\n<p>All I&#8217;m saying is, it would be really nice if Outlook could export its preferences to a file.<sup>[<a href=\"10-2\">2<\/a>]<\/sup>  Although hey, you know what would be even better? What if we had a system where all well-behaved applications stored their preferences in easily-readable text files?  Heck, maybe they could even store all their preferences under a common directory.  Just imagine, you could <a href=\"http:\/\/jeremy.zawodny.com\/blog\/archives\/001962.html\" title=\"But hey, at least you have *twice* the GHz Jeremy does\">copy the old directory to the new machine<\/a>, swap it in, and presto! &#8212; all your applications would just <em>work<\/em>. That would be some sweet-ass technology. Boy howdy.<\/p>\n<p><small><a name=\"10-1\"><\/a>1. Although its Quake performance might be hampered a bit by the fact that it uses onboard graphics and sound.<\/small><\/p>\n<p><small><a name=\"10-2\"><\/a>2. Maybe it can, but darned if I could find the option.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I {heart} reproducible errors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}