Experiencing Slow Outlook Start-Up Times?

By Jason | Jun 19, 2008

I came across an article on an MSDN blog detailing a modification you can apply from within Windows XP or Vista in order to speed your Outlook start-up time.  Navigate to C: > Users > Your Username > AppData > Local > Microsoft > Outlook on Windows Vista or C: > Documents and Settings > Your Username > Local Settings > Application Data > Microsoft > Outlook in Windows XP and rename your "extend.dat" file to "extend.old." 

Outlook will essentially repair itself upon its next launch and recreate an extend.dat file - this should significantly reduce your start-up times.

Note, there’s no guarantee this will fix all types of slow start-up times for Outlook 2003 or 2007.  There could be plenty of other causes including a limited amount of RAM, an abundantly large personal files folder (.PST) and/or a bloated or corrupted add-in.

Source: Sundara Prabu via MSDN Blogs






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3 Comments

[...] I came across an article on an MSDN blog detailing a modification you can apply from within Windows XP or Vista in order to speed your Outlook start-up time. Navigate to C: > Users > Your Username > AppData > Local > Microsoft > Outlook …Posted from By Jason [...]

Geoff Wilson

I run Outlook 2003 and synchronise with both a Treo PDA and Salesforce.com. A few reinstalls of the Outlook connector and I had tonnes of duplicated tasks, events, and contacts (the dupe events though because they were all in the past I had no idea of the extent of). The solution I found was an app called ‘Duplicate Killer’ from a bunch called 4team.biz. Essentially analyses and removes dupes on contacts, events, tasks. I know this is going to sound like a plug but it took me ages to find something like this and it has cut my Outlook startup time from 2 mins plus to about 30 secs … I suspect there are a lot of other people out there using stuff like Salesforce with Outlook and PDAs who are going to be experiencing similar problems.

Faster Outlook Guy

Renamed extend.dat and restarted Outlook.

Worked like a champ!!

Thanks much.

XP and Outlook 2007

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