A tip for those of you who use Outlook in your day-to-day. 

My system's been running really sluggishly and I know Outlook had a lot to do with it.  It hogs a lot of memory and the .pst data file can get to be really big, which makes things worse.  Of course, the fact that I hate archiving doesn't help either.  I need to get over my dislike for the Archive function.  It's there to help me.

Yesterday I ended up calling a help desk and the tech helped me remove unnecessary items from my start-up (all those little icons at the bottom of the screen are programs which are running automatically each time you boot up).

When he saw the size of my Outlook .pst file he said it was super important that I start deleting things.  My file was 2,216,145 KB, or over 2 GBs! 

I spent a good portion of my day yesterday moving, copying, archiving but mostly deleting.  I got rid of a ton of stuff.  When I went back to the .pst file I had barely made a dent in it!  Something wasn't right.  For the amount of data I had deleted, the size of my file should have been considerably smaller, yet it wasn't.  It was maybe 5% smaller.  Not enough to make a difference in performance.

So I did a little research and discovered that all the deleting in the world isn't going to help Outlook run faster.  In addition, you need to compact the file when you're done with the deleting.

This was easy to do.  I went to Tools/Account Settings clicked on the Data Files tab, highlighted the file, clicked settings and then compact now.  That was it! 

It took about 15 minutes to finish compacting but it was worth the wait.  When I checked the size of the file after compacting, it was down to 242,065 KB, about 90% smaller.

It's not slow as molasses any more.