OK If you really, REALLY have to use Entourage then you’re bound to run into issues. Almost guaranteed. I will admit that every version of Entourage gets better and more stable but seriously, I’ll be very happy when Microsoft finally puts an end to the suffering that is Entourage.
FULL Props must go to this site where I shamelessly copied it all from (mainly because I wanted a clean version all in one place and also, to remind anyone who is reading this, again this site is more of a reference for myself and I don’t make any money from it all).
Disable DB check
- Hold down the Option key when starting Entourage, this will start the Database Utility.
- Select Set Database Preferences and click Continue.
- Uncheck “Perform Database Integrity Check”.
- Click Save.
- Click Continue.
Rebuild DB
- Hold down the Option key when starting Entourage, this will start the Database Utility.
- Select Rebuild Database and click Continue.
- Note: after the database has been rebuilt you will need to re-synchronize your entire mailbox with the Exchange server this could take some time.
Stop Spotlight
- Open Entourage From the Entourage menu (top left corner), select “Preferences”.
- When the “Preferences” window opens, under “General Preferences” select “Spotlight
- Remove the checkmark next to “Include Entourage items in Spotlight search results”
- Click on the button named “OK”
- Quit Entourage
- Open System Preferences -> Spotlight and select the “Privacy” tab. Click on the icon with a plus sign “+” and from the left hand side select “Documents” -> Microsoft User Data -> Office 200X Identities and click on “Choose”
Prevent Symantec from scanning Entourage
- Open System Preferences -> Symantec Auto Protect Settings and select the “Safe Zones” tab.
- Select the option “Everywhere except”
- Click in the empty area.
- From the window that appears, open “Documents” -> Microsoft User Data -> Office 2004 Identities and click on “Choose”
Here’s some more things to try When entourage starts it freezes for 3-6 secs (semi-normal as it needs to check ALL folders for updates). It periodically (every 5-15 minutes) does this again but it doesn’t always freeze. There seems to be no way to turn this off. This is what I did:
- Upgrade to Entourage 2008, 12.1.x or later
- Reduce the number of items in each folder, so that they are under 1000
- Open each Address Book in Entourage and re-sort the contacts by name — click on the name column to re-sort your contacts. That should cause Entourage to re-sort the list and speed things up.
- Open the Projects Center and see if there are more than 50+ projects — archive old to speed-up
- Use the Activity Monitor (Macintosh HD => Applications => Utilities) to view YOUR system activity. Sort by CPU usage to find memory hogs other than entourage
- Check for duplicate daemons. You should have only one Microsoft Database daemon in System Preferences => Accounts => “Startup items”. If you have more than one, delete all and let Entourage create a new one when it launches.
- Disable unneeded schedules: Tools => Run schedules => Edit Schedules
- Check for 3rd party add-ons and scripts in Entourage and Word
- Empty deleted items and junk-email folder (ctrl-click on each of them) — there may be a malformed spam message that’s hanging-up entourage
- Disable the “what you see is what you get” font menus. Go to Entourage > Preferences, and then, under “General Preferences”, click “General” in the left pane. Uncheck the box for “WYSIWYG font menu”. That will disable the preview of what the fonts look like in the Font menu, but it should appear faster as a result.
- flagged messages — if there are many of them, unflag some (tip: to find them: edit => advanced find => set it to look in “All Folders” (instead of this folder), then set the search term for “status => flagged”)
- Remove this font cache file: ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (11)
- Disable global auto font activation from within Suitcase. Easy way to test if Suitcase is part of the problem: Simply quit Suitcase and test launch.
- Keep your Inbox as small as possible
- How big is your message store? In Entourage you can (ctrl+click or right-click) your Exchange account in the folder list and select Folder Properties –> Storage. If it’s bigger than 1GB consider archiving some messages, calendar items, or move some messages/calendar items to Folders on My Computer.
- Open Macintosh HD => Applications => Utilities => Disk Utility and repair permissions
- In Entourage, open any message, under File => Print, uncheck Truncate Long Recipient lists
