Regarding http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925

I didn’t have any of the registry keys and I found the article a bit confusing. Especially when I could not copy and paste from the article to regedit.

The worse thing is that copy and paste from the KB to outlook fails. So I have 4 suggestions for the KB:
#A – Add another column

#B – Copy & paste from the KB doesn’t work because regedit doesn’t allow 0x0000c800 as hex number

#C – Add a little explanation on how to get the HEX numbers
E.g.:

1. Open calc.exe
2. Switch to “Programming mode”
3. Make sure to have the calculator switched to “Dec”
   
4. Enter the decimal number that you want to have as filesize
5. Click on “Hex”
6. Use that number

#D – How do I know that my changes were applied?
Tell me?

I didn’t have any of the registry keys mentioned on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925

What ensured was a lot of effort to find out, that for Outlook 2007 I am using the default value of 20GB.

2 columns should be added to this grid.

Fix the situation where there is no end user visibility when it starts compacting.
Surely by Outlook 2010 we should be able to see what it is doing…. create a Log file

Microsoft Outlook Data file is very close to the maximum.
Performance will suffer as additional compacting will be kicking in.
[OK]

Slow Outlook – Add a KB explaining the compacting reason

Outlook gets really slow when your mailbox hits certain sizes eg. 1.9GB (for 2007 ANSI) or 19GB (for 2007 Unicode) or 48GB (for 2010 Unicode)

Outlook gets really slow when your mailbox gets near its maximum… it kicks in a whole lot of CPU processing

The performance problems happen because the OST/PST silently takes it upon itself to compact much more aggressively than it would in a situation in which it’s got “room to spare”.

The specifics are:
• Outlook 2007 is 1.9GB (for ANSI OST/PST)
  The 1.9GB limit is a hard limit (it relates to a fundamental limitation in the on-disk format) and, therefore, there is no work around (short of moving some of the data to another store or deleting it and allowing compaction to run its course).
• Outlook 2007 is 19GB (for Unicode OST/PST)
  This is not a hard limit, the file format is capable of growing larger and so there is a work-around that can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925.
• Outlook 2010 is 48GB (for Unicode OST/PST)
  The new defaults in 2010 are 50GB for max file size and 47.5GB (95% of 50GB) for the warn file size in Unicode OSTs/PSTs.

Note: It’s also worth looking over the information in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940226, which covers some of the more common root causes of Outlook performance issues. In particular, the table about SSDs can be useful for setting expectations (and keep in mind that the Vista WinSAT tool is fundamentally different than the Win7 WinSAT tool and you should download the Vista one and run it on your win7 machine if you want to compare your numbers to the numbers in the chart).

• This is a weird thing… what is it doing when it gets to this point?
• If you google, many results incorrectly seem to be talking about a corrupt ‘offline address book template file’. Am I correct in assuming that they just were not patient enough?
• Why does it take so long?

(feels like an eternity… actually, you think it is hung… but it does complete)