Posts tagged with Outlook

In Nigel’s latest blog, he wrote about using the Fusion for Gaming utility ¹ to improve his notebook battery life while in-flight.  Since launching and blogging on the Fusion for Gaming utility last week, I have also done some simple, ad-hoc testing outside of the gaming space.  While it may seem counter-intuitive to do so given the name, I wanted to see if the underlying technology could help me with a challenge I have “at work.”    I am excited to say, after a few hours of testing, my Outlook experience feels significantly faster with the utility running.

At work, like many AMD employees and enterprise users, I run Microsoft Outlook 2007 along with the full Office 2007 suite.  I run a Microsoft Vista Enterprise-based, multi-monitor desktop in order to do many different things at the same time.  I “megatask,” which is simply hard-core multi-tasking.

If you have used Outlook lately, you know that it’s a lot more than just an email client.  Outlook links to literally everything… it connects your email to your calendar to your task management system to your journal to your contact list to your … you get the idea.  Good product.  But for about a year now, I have experienced inexplicable “pauses” when I task-switch between Outlook apps, or when Outlook is synchronizing (you know, when you get the two envelopes in your systray).  I had all the obvious things checked out:   hardware, corporate software image, Exchange Server settings, archiving, vaulting, network, etc., which always yielded some temporary relief.  Then Outlook would start ”pausing” a few weeks later, which I chalked up to doing a lot of work and getting a lot done while increasing my Exchange folder size: I fully plead guilty to AMD IT in using the folders as a file system.

So I loaded the Fusion for Gaming utility and saw an immediate improvement in my Outlook performance.  Things loaded quicker, those inexplicable “pauses” went away and it is simply delivering a more productive and enjoyable compute experience.  Sounds bizarre, I know, you should see the looks on the faces of my co-workers when I tell them this!  So I did some simple digging into the Performance Tab in Windows Task Manager to see if I could attempt to explain any of this.. and it became clearer.  On the left, you can see the relative performance data without the Fusion for Gaming utility enabled, and on the right, with the utility enabled.

It appears that on my system, Outlook likes a more limited number of “threads,” “handles” and “processes” or simply put, background tasks.  I am sure there is a more comprehensive, long-winded technical explanation from folks who are much smarter than I will ever be, but this is my experience and of course, your mileage will vary :>.

It has worked for me on Outlook, and I urge you to give the Fusion for Gaming utility a spin and let me know what you think.. also, if you are one of those scary-smart guys who can explain why technically my Outlook is faster I would love to hear from you.

My desktop work rig: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ processor @3.2GHz., ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics, Gigabyte GAMA69GM-S2H motherboard (BIOS F3A 8/3/2007) with AMD 690G chipset, 150GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive (10,000 RPM), 4GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 RAM (recognized by Vista 32 as 3GB), ATI Catalyst Control Center 8.8, AMD OverDrive 2.1.4.

¹ THIS UTILITY MAY DISABLE SECURITY / ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE, OR ADVERSELY AFFECT YOUR SYSTEM. REVIEW ACCOMPANYING DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY BEFORE INSTALLING.

Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.