I have been fortunate enough to have my own MSDN subscription for a while now and decided to take the new Microsoft Office 2007 for a test drive. It is already available via MSDN, while normal consumers will have to wait for it to hit the shelves in a store yet. The download was fairly quick and the CD ISO Image is just 422 megs in size. I did an in-place upgrade of Office 2003 to Office 2007. The upgrade went well and no problems were reported. When I opened Outlook 2007 the first time it asked to download a small piece of the desktop search to allow for instant indexing and search. “Sure, why not” I thought. After the installation I saw a lot of disk activity which I expected as the existing mail file needed to be indexed. Outlook 2007 remained slow for the rest of the evening and that was Ok.

The next morning I started the laptop to download emails. 74 messages were received overnight and that should be a quick download. Well, 10 minutes later Outlook 2007 was still downloading the messages. I removed the desktop search engine it had downloaded hoping to speed things up, but that was not it. Downloading messages via POP3 or IMAP with Outlook 2007 is very slow. Annoying slow. Not acceptable slow. Keep in mind that this is the final code. it’s not beta or release candidate. Also keep in mind that this is a dual core CPU / 2 GB / 7200 RPM hard drive laptop on cable modem with extended speeds.

What the heck is going on? I searched via Google for this behavior and it was reported quite often during the beta test phase of Office 2007. Everyone seemed to expect Microsoft would fix it, but from what I can tell now - Microsoft did not fix the slow email downloads in Outlook 2007. I will keep Outlook 2007 installed until the weekend, but if I can’t find a fix for Outlook 2007 being so slow, I will have to remove Outlook 2007 and go back to Outlook 2003.