Windows Live Mail Speed Up
Windows Mail, the successor to Outlook Express, is included in the Vista operating system as a standard e-mail client for the O/S. Like Outlook it allows for sending and receiving e-mail (by setting up an account of course) and provides the usual features such as ‘phishing’ filters, saving e-mails and addresses and other useful stuff.
Windows Mail was followed by Windows Live Mail, which goes with Microsoft’s ‘Live’ services; as the name indicates these mainly include applications for browsing or exchanging files, such as a Photo Gallery, MSN (Instant Messaging) and many other similar things.
Both Windows Mail and Live Mail have sometimes been criticised by users as being sluggish or generally slow to start-up; these are all fixable problems of course, and we will look at possible solutions if you are having such problems.
Speeding-up Windows Live Mail
Possible problems for slowing down Live services, particularly Mail and MSN, include:
– ISSUE: Existing registry entries for programs which have not been uninstalled properly; you can remove these with freeware programs (we will look at how to do this).
– FIX: You can download CC Cleaner, a free tool which includes a registry cleaner as well as other applications (an unused-files remover, internet cleanup and others)
– ISSUE: Insufficient amounts of RAM; this could be that it’s being used by something else or you need to re-assign priorities in task manager. Not enough memory slows down most applications and also applies to WLM.
– FIX (XP): Windows Live services require at least 256meg in XP to run efficiently (512 in Vista). Right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Click on the Processes tab. Check if anything is using up too much RAM: terminate the program or Right-click on it and ‘Set Priority’ to ‘Low’.
– ISSUE: A Virus, malware or spyware is present on your machine and prevents applications from running properly (mostly by taking-up valuable resources such as memory).
– FIX: Run your virus scanner or something like Ad-Aware and it should detect if there are any problems on your system
– ISSUE: An incorrectly configured account could cause slow-start up or generally the client not running properly.
– FIX: You will simply need to delete and set-up your account again, like you did the first time. This kind of problem usually appears very early-on so it is unlikely you will loose lots of contacts or large amounts of data.
You can also check the following search, on the Windows Vista Forums, to read of any other problems with the ‘Live’ mail service:
