I wanted to make the clarification that compacting is not the same as
defragmenting. When you compact, you are removing empty space that has
accumulated within the scope of the file. Compacting reduces the actual
file size. When you defragment, it's kind of like putting the fragments of
the file which are scattered all over the hard drive plate into one
contiguous track. Defragmenting greatly increases file-access speed because
the hard drive head won't move all over the place to read the information.
Defragmenting also reduces the amount of physical space that the file uses
up on the disk, depending on the size of the hard disk blocks.
On another note, Office Outlook 2003 has new functionality that will reduce
the fragmentation of PST files. Instead of growing the PST incrementally
every time it needs additional space, it now grows by blocks of 256kb (until
the file reaches approximately 20Mb), and grows by blocks of 2Mb after that.
This means the PST can have at most 570 fragments for its first Gigabyte and
at most 500 fragments for any subsequent Gigabyte. It is currently not
uncommon to see a large PST having several thousand fragments per Gigabyte,
with a theoretical maximum well into the millions of fragments per Gigabyte.
Hopefully some of you will find this information useful =)
--
Charles Beauregard-Tellier
Software Test Engineer
Microsoft Office
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Please do not send e-mail directly to this alias. This alias is for
newsgroup purposes only.
Nikki said:
Open Outlook
Right Click on the top level of the pst.
Select PROPERTIES
Click the ADVANCED... button
Click COMPACT NOW... button
--
Nikki Peterson [MVP - Outlook]
A cheap trick to defragment a PST is to make a copy of
it, delete the original PST and rename the copy to the
original name.
Hope this helps!
Charles Beauregard-Tellier
Software Test Engineer
Microsoft Outlook | PowerPoint | Graphics
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and
confers no rights.
-----Original Message-----
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to defragment
my .pst file? Every other file on my hard drive
defragments successfully except for my Outlook 2000 .pst
file. It currently has over 4000 fragments so I think it
would really improve performance to defragement it.
I've run the inbox repair tool which found only "minor
inconsistencies" and I've even tried running the
defragment tool in safe mode thinking that some other
process was preventing it from working. I have also run
Norton Anitvirus with the latest virus definitions and
everything appears in good shape.
If the defragment tool won't do the trick is there any
other method for defragmenting the file?
Thanks!
.
