I use Outlook (came with my iPaq) and I’m not the cleaning kind. Recently I checked the size of my PST file, and saw that its size is over 800MBytes. Since the disk it’s on also houses my “internet cache”, this disk is … well … let’s say fragmented. I think there is no file on that disk that resides in one contiguous part.
Since the recent disk-switch, I have a partition with over 30GByte of diskspace, so I closed Outlook, moved the PST file to the other disk (from a SCSI-Wide disk to a IDE Ultra/100 disk) and started defrag to be able to copy the PST file back, but less fragmented.
So I thought, what would happen if I start Outlook now? Will it ask for the new location of the PST file? To my surprise it did. After pointing to it, Outlook gives a message about not being able to open “…blabla personal folder bla bla…” and then quits. When I started Outlook again, everything was there, as expected. With one exception: there was no rattling of the disk, and the startup is almost instantly. Wow. Accessing a file of over 800MBytes, and still maintaining an “instant-on” feeling really impressed me. I know Outlook isn’t the best tool around (I must use it to be able to synchronize the iPaq), but this kind of performance is superb.