Bor­ing post sub­ject, I know. But check this out:

Took around a full minute for the folder to load, on an Athlon 64 3200+ clocked at 2.4GHz with 2GB of fairly quick memory.

Since when do apps alert in the tray about load­ing a view? If Out­look didn’t expend resources on a generally-useless tray icon (really, it doesn’t even change when you have new mail wait­ing), maybe it wouldn’t take so bloody long to do anything.

I’ve got a dual core 4200+ on the way, but really doubt it’ll make any dif­fer­ence when the fault is largely soft­ware that sucks. Not say­ing that it’s just Out­look at fault… I’m inclined to place a fair degree of blame on the well-known-to-be-sucky Win­dows Desk­top Search. But it just inte­grates best… why does Microsoft have to pro­duce prod­ucts that suck?!

Speak­ing of which, my iPaq is work­ing again with a brand new extended bat­tery. Apart from the slow proces­sor, it’s doing great… but I’m going to test-drive a Palm Z72 for a few days and see if it does any bet­ter. Basi­cally, I don’t really need the GSM/GPRS func­tion­al­ity on the iPaq because it’s faster for me to con­nect via my Sony Eric­s­son via Blue­tooth (as there’s no HSDPA on the iPaq). I’ll imme­di­ately miss the wire­less, but have sur­vived sev­eral months with­out it, and SDiO wifi cards are a pos­si­bil­ity for the palm… I doubt they’re par­tic­u­larly com­mon, though. Have been con­sid­er­ing a Black­berry, but they’re pretty restricted in a whole heap of ways that PDAs aren’t. For exam­ple, ever tried get­ting an SSH client on a Black­berry? I haven’t. But have my doubts it could be done!

Any­way. Don’t use Out­look 2007 unless you have to.  It has nice multi-calendar/iCal sup­port, but that’s about all it has going for it. Still no inbuilt SMS/MMS sup­port, the ren­derer is a regres­sion in the truest sense of the term (doesn’t even sup­port back­ground images — IE7 comes out, which is an awe­some browser, and they decide it would be a good idea to force Word 2007 to be the ren­derer. Bril­liant.), thor­oughly mediocre RSS/feed-reading capa­bil­i­ties, and, to top it all off, it’s crap-slow (com­pared to ear­lier versions).

If it offers group­ware advan­tages I don’t know of them (but doubt it could, it’s always been fairly com­pre­hen­sive on that front), and chances are they won’t be par­tic­u­larly enabled until Server 2008 is released. Am guess­ing here, but not with­out some reasoning.

Avoid.

p.s. Yes, I’m prob­a­bly over­due for a Win­dows rein­stall.  Unfor­tu­nately a fairly major project cropped up just as I’d sched­uled one, and I still haven’t got around to it. Will prob­a­bly hunt down the right prod­uct key when the new CPU gets here early next week: that’s a large part of the prob­lem, Microsoft appar­ently expect that home users either buy pre­built sys­tems with stu­pid crapware-filled restore disks, or are hard­core tech using pirates/MSDN users (same thing… the users rarely paid for the MSDN subs, mostly its their work­place). I have 5 XP Pro licenses of dif­fer­ent vari­eties (not to men­tion pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Win­dows), and of those a bunch are the same prod­uct type (upgrade)… which makes license man­age­ment and com­pli­ance a bit of a challenge!

What I’d love MS to do is cre­ate a site-licensing prod­uct for SOHO users with flex­i­ble and trans­fer­able licens­ing at retail OEM pric­ing (that sounds dumb, but I mean still charg­ing what us mor­tals pay for OEM licenses, not the vol­ume prices that Dell, Lenovo, et al. get) — it’d be sim­ple, web admin­is­tered (not requir­ing a local server), and increas­ingly rel­e­vant in homes which are fea­tur­ing more and more computers.