Monster .PST: Is it a problem? What to do?

[Guest]

The performance of my laptop has deteriorated and I suspect that part of the
problem my Outlook .PST file, which is 754 MB. Is that so big, it could be
affecting my computer’s performance?
If yes, what should I do? I delete all the junk mail, but I keep the
email worth keeping. I hate to use the archive feature in Outlook, because I
tried it once a few years ago and I don’t even know how to access my old
email. It seems that the archiving option in Outlook makes it so you can’t
easily look back and examine old email. Nevertheless, if my .PST is causing
the trouble, I have to do something. Any recommendations?
BTW, I’m running MS Office 2003 on XP using an IBM ThinkPad, X31 with
512 meg of RAM. The hard drive is virtually full, but I can’t delete any more
programs, and this probably doesn’t help.
Thank you for any thoughts you have.
Bob

 

[Vince Averello [MVP-Outlook]]

If you archive to another PST you can open it easily using the File menu >
Open > Outlook Data File command. You can then see the folders in that PST
as part of your folder tree or use Advanced Find to search through it.

 

[Guest]

Thank you Vince for your reply. A couple of questions: 1. do you think this
will make a difference in my machine performance? 2. To do as you suggest,
should I go into Windows Explorer and make a copy of the .PST file and then
archive that, or do I do this directly from within Outlook? If it is the
latter, is it possible to keep, say the last year or two of email as the
non-archived currently active Outlook PST file?

 

[Vince Averello [MVP-Outlook]]

1. It may help
2. Do it from within Outlook. You can set the age of items you want archived
so what you want should be possible.

 

[Guest]

Hi Vince. Thanks again. I tried to follow you advice about archiving, but I
received the following error message: "Error while archiving store "Personal
Folders". The operation failed. An object could not be found. OK."
I should note that My PST file is located not on my C: drive with Outlook,
but on my E: drive which is for data. (I have done it this way so as to
fascilitate backing up.)
Any thoughts on what might be the problem and what I should do? Thanks.
Bob

 

[Brian Tillman]

The performance of my laptop has deteriorated and I suspect that part
of the problem my Outlook .PST file, which is 754 MB. Is that so big,
it could be affecting my computer’s performance?

With Outlook 2003, generally not. If youre hard drive is nearly full,
however, that could have general performance effects for many apps.

 

[Pat Willener]

I would recommend
- run scanpst against the PST file (after a backup, of course)
- compact the file if you have many items deleted
- defragment the partition that contains the PST file