the entourage experience

For ages I’ve been trying to work out why my mac has been running so slow. Its a better spec than my powerbook, and yet that runs much faster and zipper. Last week I felt I’d tried everything else (Disk Doctor, Disk Utility, repairing permissions, defragging, system optimiser etc) and all that was left was a clean install. OS X shouldn’t need this in the way that 0S9 used to. And lo, it made no difference apart from gaining some HD space back.

Today I found out what was wrong. I use Microsoft Entourage, a fantastic application which organizes my life, stores my notes and contacts, keeps track of my jobs, as well providing my email. It started going very wappy. I rebuilt the mail database (start up Entourage while holding down the option key). ‘Rebuilding and compacting 8457 messages’ said the window (I hadn’t done it for a while). Once it had finished (and old database files trashed), not only was Entourage back to normal, but my whole mac was zippy and responsive again.

My wife, who is great believer in archiving old emails, is now laughing at me, “So you can use Movable Type, but you can’t use email properly?!”

Let this be a lesson to you. Rebuild. Regularly.

Tags: email, osx, rants, software