While Microsoft Outlook is a fairly powerful software, there are times when a certain sluggishness starts to creep into its performance. You may notice that Outlook takes a long time in starting up, loading all the data or perhaps in sending or receiving emails. Sometimes, different error messages crop up when you are using Outlook. All these generally indicate that your PST file may have become too big for Outlook to manage efficiently and that you may need to take steps to reduce the size of the PST files so that Outlook runs as efficiently as before. Of course, occasionally, the problem may be due to a corrupted PST file, in which case you may need to repair Outlook using third-party tools such Advanced Outlook Repair.
Let us begin by understanding how we can reduce the size of PST files and what the benefits of doing so are. First of all, you need to truly get rid of all the unwanted items in your Outlook folders. If you are storing all lot of junk email, unused email, old appointments or tasks, it is worthwhile to begin by clearing off all this unwanted data. You should be aware though that merely deleting the items is not enough ' you should also remove them from the Deleted Items folder. This way, you can use the space occupied by the unwanted data. Secondly, you can compact the PST file that is being used by Outlook to reduce its overall size thereby allowing Outlook to manage the file more efficiently. You need to bear in mind that more serious errors may need to be fixed by using advanced tools such as Advanced Outlook Repair that can help you repair Outlook and PST files.
There are two ways in which you can compact PST files ' you could either do it manually when you sense that the file has grown large enough or you could allow Outlook to perform compaction automatically. This way, the software checks if the file has grown large enough to warrant compaction and then automatically runs the compaction task. Automatic compaction also has the advantage that it runs as an idle task in the background and does not affect the running of the computer.
