How to Repair & Compress an Outlook.pst file.

This video shows how I personally addressed an issue with my windows 7 laptop slowing down considerably, applications like Outlook, Internet Explorer, Office, my OpenInsight based application and others constantly not responding, my fan constantly running and application taking an age to run.

I am not sure that this is all down to MS Outlook, but over the last few weeks I have had trouble with not being able to upgrade my MS office 2007 system to 2010, my Outlook calendar would not open and I was experiencing all manner of hanging issue and blue screens of death and system memory dumps. In addition, I had been unable to even backup my Outlook system as the .pst file was so huge (6.4Gb). It was beginning to drive me nuts.

Taking some advice I ran a Malware scan, Anti-Virus scan, defrags, deleted unused files and programs, etc. etc. The scans came back clear and the deleted files freed up a lot of space, but still my machine was slow and painful to use. One of my technical colleagues mentioned compacting (compressing) my Outlook system and this got me thinking and Googling for tools to help. This research resulted in two courses of action:

1) I ran a little known Scan utility that scans and repairs Outlook .pst and .ost files. This found some issues; I backed up the files and ran the repair option. This resulted in my Outlook calendar now working, but the .pst file was still huge.

2) Although I had deleted over half of my email, the .pst file did not reduce in size whatsoever and it appeared to just keep growing. I therefore looked through the menu items in Outlook 2007 and through a little luck I found a compression routine that is perfect to complress Outlook.pst files. This reduced my Outlook.pst file from over 6.4Gb to just 675Mb over 13 hours.

Further research online indicates that I was not alone in running a huge Outlook.pst file and there are plenty of references to both the SCANPST (and SCANOST) utility and the compact utility. I am not sure how systems behave on Windows XP and the forthcoming Windows 2008, nor with Office 2010 and later because my experiences were on a laptop running Windows 7 Ultimate and Office 2007. However, this posting outlines the issue and resolution that worked for me. I am not saying that this will be true for everyone, but it is certainly something worth thinking about if you are an Outlook user with a huge Outlook.pst or Outlook.ost file or where you are having issues like mine above.

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Closed Caption:

hello my name is Martin and for those of
you that normally frequent my best soft
channel you'll be expecting another
video about open insight or some
revelation technology today I've got
something a little bit more different
for you it's all to do with outlook and
it stems back to a problem that I've had
on my machine for a number of weeks and
that's got worse and worse and worse and
really came to head over the weekend my
machine has been getting slower and
slower the fan has been running
frequently I've had a lot of issues on
window 7 where applications have not
been responding applications not limited
to microsoft and my own applications so
for instance internet explorer has been
having trouble office has been having
trouble outlook has been having trouble
and also my open site rats application
as well as others and they all came up
not responding
if I left them sometimes they would
start to respond but very often they
wouldn't respond at all i found that the
applications were taking a long time to
boot up and I was getting blue screen of
death memory dump problems and all sorts
of things so i put a request out to my
support guys at revelation and they came
back to me with a number of suggestions
such as running online antivirus
checkers checking for malware dat
folders and data files and programs that
i didn't need just basically cleaning up
my system another bad night I went
through all of that and it helped but he
didn't help that much
certainly I didn't find any big
performance increase night I didn't find
that these hanging issue is going away
but I did have a couple of things that
came up and one was that my calendar in
outlook had not been working for some
considerable time so I suspected there
was a problem somewhere and then when i
was going to upgrade from office 2007 to
2010 the upgrade process told me that I
had some corrupted files in office and
they would need to be sorted out first
of all and one of my colleagues
suggested compacting the outlook
database which is something I've never
done before with in the open insight
world we work with self-optimizing files
that resides themselves and it's pretty
much a certificate
database so we forget that sometimes you
need to think about your database
administration and the like so I popped
onto google and one of the first things
that I found was that there is a scan
utility within office now if you locate
where your office folder is in our mind
machine it's in program files microsoft
office office 12 within here there is a
file which is scan OST and scan PST now
I don't have any OST files on my system
but it do have a number of PST files so
i actually ran and executed that program
you simply tell the system way or PST
file is she got when started it will
then run through if you find any errors
is it comes back and it says you want to
back those error backup system and then
you want to fix those errors which I did
and that sorted me out i'm going to do
that right now but once I did she run
those files I then found that my
calendar would work and i haven't tried
upgrading to 2010 yet but I'm assuming
that will be fine but I still had my
issues with the resources and stuff
now if you actually look at the PST
files within the system now my machine
I've got an arc I if I've got a number
hotmail ones because I bring all my
email and together but i also have my
outlook PST file now before i run this
cleanup routine that file was six point
four gigabytes of data and I wasn't able
to update it because the fire was too
large for USB sticks for my removable
hard drive from my Drago and number of
other removable backup devices that I
couldn't actually back up that file
which was worrying me quite considerably
and I saw google around to see what was
going on until didn't find too much and
this suggestion i needed to compact the
data was troubling me a little bit so
what I did is actually went into my
outlook system started just to look
around and under fire
oil there is a data file management
option which takes you into this data
files window and well okay i can add to
my setting says default nothing really
overly obvious there that I could do as
far as data management is concerned I
don't know why but I double create on
the personal folders link here just on
farting just double-clicked it enough
pot this little window personal folders
which gives you the finest stuff and a
compact now button and what I actually
went ahead and did was to click that
compact now button and then that goes
away any compacts the file for you now
this took ages on my particular system
to about 13 hours to reduce it from six
point four gigabytes but if I went back
into the view the file within my
interview with in my explorer windows
explorer I actually watched this file
reduce significantly over those 13 hours
now my recommendation would be to
actually watch the file reducing here
because if we go back to the window here
this personal folders window all you get
is the compacting now this little window
here compacting come up and you don't
actually know that it's doing anything
until your first back to this window but
since I compacted the file
I'm now down to 670 or megabytes and
everything is running fine i've had my
phone hasn't been running I haven't had
any non-responding issues today and a
little bit more research was talking to
one of my other technical colleagues
today has shown that on a lot of systems
mind seem to be the case your email
comes into outlook outlook then assigns
the memory for that particular email but
when you delete the email it doesn't
free up that memory it still holds it to
PST file is getting bigger and bigger
and bigger all of the time until you
compact that and in my view it's hidden
away a little bit yes you can find that
out
you know you've got a problem then you
go and google it but I didn't know that
and I just thought i would create this
video just so that you can see what i
did they help me to get over this issue
and free up my machine and it was all
very easy although it took a little time
so i hope you find it useful if you do
please add a comment this video will
catch me on my blog you know I hope you
find it useful
catch you later thanks for this thing
yeah
yeah