Ever since Outlook 2007 was released it has had major performance issues with larger PST and OST files. After a couple of months a pre-SP1 patch (April 13 2007) softened the issue, but Microsoft still recommended keeping your OST small. Still major disk activity when launching Outlook.

Now MS has released a pre-SP2 performance update for Outlook and WOW! Now we are where it should have been at RTM. With this new patch, new OST/PST guidelines are posted:

• 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.

So every Outlook 2007 cached mode user (OST file) or users using PST’s should install this patch right away. You have to register through the KB article to get the patch.

More info: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968009/

and http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/03/24/450881.aspx

View and request hotfix downloads

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