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Do you have trouble with Outlook 2007 and other programs running slowly under Windows Vista? Opening Explorer windows, saving documents and even simple typing can make you wait and wait. Looking around the internet, there are plenty of people with similar problems.
We've had more reports of excruciatingly slow running Windows Vista, especially with Outlook 2007, and given that Peter's main computer has the same problem, we've spent some time working on the problem.
There's nothing on the Microsoft web site to help, which figures because to admit a problem of this size would affect sales of both the operating system and Office suite.
We have some theories about the problem and some possible workarounds that might help you.
What's the problem?
The problem seems to be the Windows Vista indexing service when used with a lower level of physical RAM (in this context 'low' can mean 2GB!) and a lot of items to be indexed (documents and especially emails in Outlook).
Our informal tests suggest the Vista indexing services grabs more and more resources (especially RAM) as the number of indexed items grows. For most people the majority of indexed items are in Outlook.
Vista runs fine when there's little to be indexed but once you put any kind of reasonable load on it, the indexing system starts bogging down the entire works. Once you get a few hundred thousand indexable items, the Vista indexing service drags the entire system down.
Adding RAM will speed things up a bit but, over time, the problem may return as the number of indexed items rises.
Regardless of the indexing status, the operating system should not slow down to this degree. Apologists for Microsoft have said that the problem is having 'too many' emails in Outlook - which is a typical 'blame the customer' response from Microsoft. Outlook, by design, can cope with extremely large data files (ie PST / OST files of many gigabytes). Microsoft went to the trouble of revamping the data file format to provide for much larger data files than are currently in use.
Now the Vista indexing service is undoing that work. Vista indexing was supposed to make finding things easier, instead it forces you to reduce your Outlook data to suit the limitations of the operating system.
In this important respect Windows Vista is a backward step. Instead of technical advancements to deal with the accumulation of data put on computers, Vista's indexing service put effective limits on what you can store and retrieve on your computer.
It is a bug in Vista, for the operating system should be able to cope with much more data than is currently common. Instead it can deal with less than usual or it forces the user to trim their information storage to cope with Microsoft's failure.
Other desktop search products like Google Desktop Search and Copernic Desktop Search can index large quantities of data without slow-down on a Vista computer. You would expect Vista indexing, as part of the operating system, to be able to perform better than third-party products - not worse.
Article posted: Thursday, 23 August 2007
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