Why is Outlook slowing my PC?

QOver recent weeks my PC seems to have got slower and slower. A bit of testing on my part suggests that Outlook is the cause, as when this isn’t running everything seems to run normally. Over the years I’ve collected a lot of emails, because I don’t like deleting anything — I’m talking tens of thousands of messages here. In an effort to speed things up I spent a whole day deleting loads of older and unnecessary messages, but I noticed that it didn’t seem to make the database any smaller (it started at about 8GB and it’s still at around 8GB, even having deleted thousands of emails). My PC is still slow when Outlook is running. Why doesn’t deleting emails shrink the size of my Outlook PST file? Is there anything else to try to speed up my PC, or should I consider ditching Outlook? I use the 2013 edition, incidentally.

AOutlook’s database doesn’t automatically reduce in size when you delete emails. Moreover, while Outlook 2013 can in theory deal with PST files of up 50GB in size, the reality is that the program’s performance really starts to suffer when the database grows beyond a few gigabytes. Microsoft knows this, and has even published a chart explaining how much slowdown to expect for various database sizes and hardware configuration – take a look at www. snipca.com/24420.

Outlook’s creeping slowdown will absolutely affect your PC’S performance because the program is always working, even if it’s open only in the background. And, as that Microsoft page admits, it will only get worse as the database grows. Anyone sticking with Outlook but not wanting to delete emails will either need better hardware, to periodically archive old emails and create a new database or, as in your case, delete loads of unwanted messages.

However, there’s a crucial step for anyone adopting that last strategy: compacting the database. This will properly clear out the deleted messages and rebuild the PST file, making it smaller in the process. To do this, click File, followed by Account Settings, then Account Settings again. Now choose the Data Files tab, click to select your PST file then click Settings. Finally, click Compact Now (see screenshot). The process might take an hour or two to complete.