Have you installed Office 2007 innocently thinking it would be a performance boost and upgrade to the proceeding version? Well yes, stupidly, so did I. I mean, come on, it's Office 2007 - it going to be fantastic right? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?....
I am now a very angry/frustrated person. Why did i let myself upgrade my desktop? I even reminded myself beforehand - "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" - why couldn't I just listen? The problem was that a friend of mine had a spare copy (completely legitamate copy I should add) of Windows Office 2007 Ultimate which he said i could have. And i guess i couldn't resist getting the latest shiny software for my computer. It was like being Indiana Jones as he was about to remove the head statue from the beginning scene of Raiders...you know you should really being doing it because it's likely to to be frought with danger, but you just can't help yourself! Well i learned my lesson! And that's it - i quit! I quit Microsoft products, or at least until i decide it's ok to spend £5+ on a new Mac Pro and all the software I'll have to get for it.
You see, I've been a PC user ever since I bought my first computer. I've battled with many versions of MS operating systems (don't get me started on ME) and software products, thinking that this was the norm and what everyone did - because computers are complexe systems. And then I bought my first Mac about 6 months ago. It was like a life time of unncessary problems and frustration had been lifted from me. Everything worked and worked quickly - the way things should work. I've not had a single problem so far with my Mac. The day I opened it out of the box I connected instantly to my wireless network, and transferred 30 gigs of data in one go from my PC - something I had failed to do over the course of 2 years of trying to get my Dell Latitude (XP) to talk to my Dell desktop (XP). They could never talk to each other without crashing after 3 or 4 minutes.
Anyway, I feel I'm digressing away from the original title of the post. The point is that I installed Office 2007 and as a result my computer is now the equivalent of a dribbling drunk at 4 in morning slouched in the street after a heavy night on the town. Hopefully, I found a few solutions that may help you out if you have experienced the same problem. They seem to have worked for me, but I only just implemented the changes, so i will post again to confirm if they have worked to permenantly improve the performance of my PC.
Firstly from search around t'interweb, I found out that there was a patch from Microsoft to improve system performance. So i installed that. But it didn't really seem to work.
Next, I found out that disabling the add-ins in Outlook would help.
1. Go to Tools, Trust Center, then Addins.
3. Click “Go…” at the bottom and uncheck Outlookaddins.
4. I unchecked everything EXCEPT Windows Indexing, as per advice from other internet sources.
This seemed to work as far as improving Outlook's performance. But there was still a slowness and delay in my computer which was not present before I installed Office 2007. I could hear the processor working away when it wouldn't have any reason to. So i dug around a little more and found the culprit to be searchindexer.exe - a file that indexes your files to make finding them in the future quicker. It isn't critial to the system's operation, so i diabled it and instantly the process quietened and my machine resumed normal operation. I have noticed though, that it takes to starting itself up on its own, my next task is to disable it completely.
As i said, i will check back again to confirm any findings or add to any steps to completely sort the problem out. However, i think the best solution will be to stop using Microsoft products. Who's with me? Right, let's go!...
