Outlook 2007 upgrade blues

Jason Busch reports on his unpleasant experience trying to get Vista and Office 2007 to work on a new $2,800 Dell M1210 notebook systems with 2GB of memory that came preloaded with the new operating system and office suite.

His issue:

The problem -- which is absolutely inexcusable -- is that Office 2007 (Outlook, specifically) crawls, even on this superfast machine. The hard-drive is also constantly in motion, slowing things down even more. I'm not alone in these observations. You can read other Office 2007 horror stories here and here. Despite a small .PST file -- I reduced mine from close to a gig to less than 150 MB -- my Intel Centrino Duo-driven notebook chugs along like a 386 trying to run an application originally written for a mainframe system. Even such tasks as composing a simple email are delayed by a few seconds before my typed words ultimately appear on the screen (and send / receives and related activities take an eternity).

I have heard numerous reports of problems with upgrading, which is not unexpected given the number of use cases that intersect with the millions of lines of Microsoft code. I don't plan to upgrade until others have paved the way with getting their small or large problems with Vista and Office resolved, and when Microsoft puts out a service pack that fixes the bugs that escaped notice during the years of development and testing. Can anyone out there help Jason with his problem?

See also: Chris Pirillo gives ten reasons why he is 'upgrading' from Vista back to Windows XP