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If you plan to use Outlook 2007, you need an extremely powerful computer and capability to kill it from outside of Windows. I have a Core 2 Duo E6700 desktop with 3 GB RAM and 1 TB hard drive. It is not good enough for Outlook 2007. I configured it to get POP3 for my gmail account and for my hotmail account. Nothing else. Every time I open it, after about a minute, my computer stops responding. If I don’t load Outlook 2007, there is no problem.

There is a bunch of other applications and services running on my computer. SQL Server 2005 runs without any problem. When I look at it, SQL Server 2005 uses far less resources than Outlook 2007. Funny thing is, once the system becomes too slow or unresponsive, not even task manager will come up. The system is not hanging because the mouse cursor responds and alt tab works. My only recourse is to press the reset button. Than god, the motherboard makers still have control over the hard reset.

Do you use any version of Outlook? Open the task manager and add the memory usage to the columns displayed. Now sort the list by memory usage and see where Outlook stands. Most probably that is the most memory consuming application on your desktop. Now add the number of threads to the display and sort and see which application uses most number of threads. Outlook probably uses 50 or more threads. For doing what?

I am glad that Linux desktops are becoming more and more user friendly. I was surprised by the quality of Open SuSE 10.2. It is well beyond Windows XP. May be not as good as Vista in looks. But If you are satisfied with the looks of XP and crave more security and freedom, jump to Open SuSE 10.2. I do not have a clean install of Open SuSE 10.2, it is just a patch on top SuSE Linux 10.1. I am impressed by that. I don’t know if there will be more enhancements if I did a clean install. This one runs on a pretty old Intel Pentium 4 machine and responds pretty well. I have not used Office applications on this machine because I use it as server rather than as a workstation. It looks like I will be slowly switching to Linux. Sorry Mac fans, I am not fan of extreme propriety hardware and software. Microsoft is good enough if I have to use propriety stuff.