My wife's laptop had been getting crazy slow over the last few months. I'd watch things with task manager and her disk access was often at 100%. Did some web searching and it mentioned Microsoft Outlook would sometimes cause this to happen. It would sometimes go into a mode where the disk drive was spinning so hard it became loud enough to hear across the room. I'd kill off Outlook, and that typically stopped the disk drive from spinning like crazy. But it never really fixed the problem of the computer being slow, it would go in and out of the high disk usage mode regularly. Also suspected a virus, but the security system reported none. So I bought a new laptop and on Sat AM I started getting it ready to replace the old one.
She uses Outlook for her work e-mail because the company she works with requires it and has it set up on a Microsoft Exchange system, but for her personal e-mail she uses Mozilla Thunderbird. When I went to copy the Thunderbird profile folder over to the new computer, it was enormous, around 14GB. I looked into her e-mail and there were 127,000 e-mails in the Trash folder (she's not very computer savvy, so doesn't know to clear these things out occasionally, and the option to have T-bird auto-compact wasn't enabled). So, before moving it to the new computer I decided to clean it up a bit first. Well, two days later, after cleaning up Thunderbird and compacting the folders, her old laptop seems to be running more or less normally again.
I'm not sure exactly how T-bird was causing the problem, because it didn't show excessive memory usage or disk usage in Task Manager, but it appears to have been the cause. Its not like having a 14GB folder on a disk partition that's lightly used would cause issues AFAIK, so I don't quite understand how it was causing issues, but so far it appears that it was. I'll keep an eye on it going forward and see what happens, but so far so good.
Just wanted to mention this so that anyone else using T-bird is aware of this potential issue, and to see if anyone else had noticed this, or could explain why it was the cause of her issues.
She uses Outlook for her work e-mail because the company she works with requires it and has it set up on a Microsoft Exchange system, but for her personal e-mail she uses Mozilla Thunderbird. When I went to copy the Thunderbird profile folder over to the new computer, it was enormous, around 14GB. I looked into her e-mail and there were 127,000 e-mails in the Trash folder (she's not very computer savvy, so doesn't know to clear these things out occasionally, and the option to have T-bird auto-compact wasn't enabled). So, before moving it to the new computer I decided to clean it up a bit first. Well, two days later, after cleaning up Thunderbird and compacting the folders, her old laptop seems to be running more or less normally again.
I'm not sure exactly how T-bird was causing the problem, because it didn't show excessive memory usage or disk usage in Task Manager, but it appears to have been the cause. Its not like having a 14GB folder on a disk partition that's lightly used would cause issues AFAIK, so I don't quite understand how it was causing issues, but so far it appears that it was. I'll keep an eye on it going forward and see what happens, but so far so good.
Just wanted to mention this so that anyone else using T-bird is aware of this potential issue, and to see if anyone else had noticed this, or could explain why it was the cause of her issues.
