Is Microsoft Outlook running super slow? Still have the dataset loading message showing you? I just love when Microsoft tries to make their software better by adding a bunch of useless features to them! I don’t know why it takes hours to load a profile!
Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to understand and talk about Microsoft products at the same time, so you’ll have to live with the fact that each newer version of Windows and Office will only slow down your computer further. !
So if you are in the process of checking your email or creating a new rule and suddenly everything stops with “Loading dataset” shows up or Outlook just gets stuck, you’ll have to do some hard work on Outlook if you want to be able to do any work.
Here are some ways you can speed up Outlook and hopefully get rid of those annoying delays and hangs:
Table of Contents
1. Disable useless Outlook add-ins
Yeah, they’re useless, except for one that can. To disable all add-ons that are active by default, you will need to open Outlook in Administrative mode (on older Outlook versions).
First, visit C: \ Programs \ Microsoft Office \ OfficeXX, right-click the Outlook.exe program and select “Run as administrator“.
Then when Outlook loads, go to Tools from the top menu and then Trust Center.
In newer versions of Outlook, you click File And after that Option. You will see Add listed on the side of Outlook Options dialog box.
Click Add-ons in the left menu and then click To go at the bottom of the dialog where it says Manage and there is a drop down box.
You will now get a list of add-ons that you can deselect. I recommend unchecking ALL add-ons except Windows Indexing.
Go ahead and choose another option in the drop-down box, which is Exchange Client Extension. Do not disable the Exchange add-in if you are connected to a corporate network.
This one change has dramatically speeded up my Outlook installation. It also helps to reduce the number of times the dataset is loaded.
2. Turn off RSS feeds in Outlook
Another annoying default feature in Outlook is the large number of preconfigured and resource-hungry RSS feeds due to synchronization.
Outlook will continue to check for updates to these feeds, and as a result, things will slow down considerably. If you use another reader for your RSS feed, such as Google Reader, make sure to remove the RSS feed from Outlook.
In Outlook, go to Tools, Account Settings and then click RSS feeds.
In newer versions of Outlook, click File and then click Account Settings above Information navigation.
As you can see, I deleted all my RSS feeds so as not to use up all the CPU power for this purpose! Just click the remove button for each listed RSS feed.
3. Collapse your Outlook.pst Personal Folders
Another thing you can do to speed up Outlook is to compact your email folders so they don’t get too big. It’s best to delete any emails with large attachments, or even archive some emails if your files are larger than 1GB.
In earlier versions of Outlook, click File And after that Data file management. In newer versions of Outlook, you click Fileafterward Account Settings.
Click Data Profile and then double-click the data file that you want to collapse.
Now go ahead and click Compact now to reduce the size of the personal directory file.
4. Run the Mailbox Tool
Newer versions of Outlook also have some great built-in tools for cleaning up and reducing the size of your main PST file. Just click File and then click Tools.
You will see three options here: Clean up your mailbox, Deleted Items folder is empty and Clean up old stuff. Mailbox Cleanup has a number of tools that you can use to archive emails, empty the deleted items folder, and optionally help you find the largest emails in your Outlook data files.
The AutoArchive function is the most important as it will move all older emails to a separate PST file, which will make everything run a lot smoother. If you have thousands of emails in many different folders, Outlook will run slow on most systems.
5. Use Cached Exchange Mode
If you have an account connected to Microsoft Exchange, you should make sure Cached Exchange Mode be activated. You can do this by clicking Fileafterward Account Settings and then click Change for the account listed on Email navigation.
This will keep the most recent messages offline, so things will load faster when you access those recent emails. You can also load more emails if you want by adjusting the time frame.
Those are all the methods I could figure out so far! If you know of any other methods that will speed up super slow Outlook, post a comment and let us know! Also, if you are experiencing problems starting Outlook, check out my other posts. Interesting!
