Old Li2-Crystals

Welcome back!

There's a lot of things that can contribute to your system running sluggish or having an assortment of performance issues. This series is aimed at addressing those issues and providing tips for how to improve system performance on your XP Computer.

In this first offering I want to address your email program. One of the things that I see frequent complaints about is how long it takes this or that email client to load and be ready to use. In most cases, regardless of what email client you use, the problem can be solved with some simple housekeeping.

Almost always a slow loading email program is caused by there simply being to much mail kept. When you've got 6,000 messages in your inbox, it's going to take a while for the program to index all of them so that it can show you any one of them when you click on it. If this sounds like an exaggeration think again. I've been guilty of having as much as 9,000 messages in my inbox, with another 12,000 spread in 300 other folders!

The answer was simple. The old email needed to be cleaned out. I'll grant that it was a slow job and had to be spread out over several days but it was worth it in the end. I started with the inbox and every message was either deleted or moved to a more appropriate folder.

Then I started on the other folders, deleting messages that were out of date, expired or no longer relevant. I several cases entire folders were deleted. Oh, Don't forget the sent messages folder. I mean, seriously, do your really need a copy of the happy birthday note you sent your wife six years ago??

The last one to go was the stuff in the Junk folder. Fortunately that one is one of the few that I always kept up to date. I give everything in it a quick look to see if it's a false positive (rare these days) and then delete it.

Once all that email is deleted it's time to empty the trash folder. After the trash folder is done the last task is to compress folders and recover all that space. OE users will have to check with the help files or a friend who knows since I don't use that one. Thunderbird users just need to A) Be sure to select the Inbox. B) Click "File" and then "Compact Folders"

If you click "Compact Folders" with any other folder selected then ONLY that folder will be compacted, however when you have the Inbox selected, ALL folders get compacted.

Once you've done this the first time it's a fairly simple matter to just keep up with it. Try to at least take a few minutes once a week to do this and your email program will load faster and run more efficiently.

Finally, it's a good idea to keep a recent backup of your email program (or at least the mail folders). Each mail client will store email in it's own way. I have made the process ultra simple by using Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition as my email client. I simply installed it in C:\Portables and then at least once a week I copy the C:\Portables directory and everything in it to a flash drive.

This keeps my data protected against a catastrophic failure (This actually happened once and that backup came in real handy when my 250gb hard drive ended up being formatted!) and also allows me to use my email client on any windows computer with a USB port without anything ever being written to the host computer.

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