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 really well.[1] However, its most salient benefits are:
- It reboots really, really fast.
- It’s actually pretty quiet. Outstanding.
So after several days of blood, sweat, and more than a few tears, all my applications are loaded and working properly… with the curious exception of ClearCase, which still refuses to read the main Engineering Documents VOB. Fortunately, it’s not like my job depends on reading engineering specs.
Actually, the application that gave me the most trouble was Outlook. Displaying a message was taking over three seconds, as compared to, oh, 30 milliseconds on my old, “obsolete” machine. We soon determined that A) it was a client-side problem, and B) uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook and Office didn’t help.
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 “Enable Instant Messaging in Outlook” 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 three orders of magnitude more RAM than the computers on the Space Shuttle probably wouldn’t hurt either.
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 did 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.
All I’m saying is, it would be really nice if Outlook could export its preferences to a file.[2] 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 copy the old directory to the new machine, swap it in, and presto! — all your applications would just work. That would be some sweet-ass technology. Boy howdy.
1. Although its Quake performance might be hampered a bit by the fact that it uses onboard graphics and sound.
Outlook can export your ‘Personal File Folder’ which includes email, drafts, notes, etc, but not account settings.
“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.”
See: Firefox, Thunderbird, and the Mozilla suite.
Thunderbird has the ability to import settings from Microsoft mail applications, so making the switch shouldn’t be hard. 😉
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
Hi Noa,
Yup, you can easily dump your emails and other items to a .PST file. However, my company maintains all that stuff on the server, so that didn’t matter. What I needed was my local preferences; everything else was taken care of.
I use Firefox 0.8 at work, it’s awesome. However, Firefox is a special case in the corporate world. Despite Microsoft’s best efforts, web browsing is loosely-coupled enough for me to use alternative browsers without the IT department knowing or caring.
The same cannot be said for PIM applications. Unless Thunderbird and Mozilla Calendar can send and receive Outlook appointments, display my schedule to everyone else who’s using Outlook, and store my emails and other items on the Exchange server, all with zero effort required for my IT department, I’m afraid I’m going to have to live in Outlook land. Believe you me, I would *love* to use a different email client, if only to use one that used the standard .mbox format.
Wow, what a coincidence. I was having the exact same problem with my Outlook at work and your solution worked for me as well.
Considering I just made your PC better, Pat, I hope that’s the last I hear from you about the “Goer Effect”.
Not to rub it in, but my recent machine upgrade went a lot more smoothly.
Gah, not only can I not use an Apple at work, I don’t even have an office with a window!
That’s it, screw the corporate world, I’m going back to physics.