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Microsoft IT

Microsoft Confirms Classic Outlook CPU Usage Spikes, Offers No Fix (theregister.com) 56

Posted by msmash from the way-of-life dept.
Microsoft has acknowledged that Classic Outlook can mysteriously transform into a system resource hog, causing CPU usage spikes between 30-50% and significantly increasing power consumption on both Windows 10 and 11 systems.

Users first reported the issue in November 2024, but Microsoft only confirmed the problem this week, offering little resolution beyond stating that "the Outlook Team is investigating this issue." The company's sole workaround involves forcing a switch to the Semi-Annual Channel update through registry edits -- an approach many enterprise environments will likely avoid. Microsoft hasn't announced a definitive end date for Classic Outlook, but the company continues pushing users toward its New Outlook client despite its incomplete feature set.

Microsoft Confirms Classic Outlook CPU Usage Spikes, Offers No Fix More | Reply

Microsoft Confirms Classic Outlook CPU Usage Spikes, Offers No Fix

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  • Is what everyone is thinking , amirite?

    • uh, no peg. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      AI would imply that the people working on Outlook are actually within firing range of being competent programmers. As someone who worked with those people at Microsoft, I can assure you that is not the case. Nobody ends up on the Outlook team out of a deep and abiding desire to make the best e-mail program on the planet, and of the people on THAT team the ones working on "Classic Outlook" are not lighting up the sky with their brilliance. (In case you're wondering, the teams people want to be on at MSFT are

  • Move to Edge Outlook, I mean New Outlook

    What could be more efficient than Outlook web embedded in an Edge browser?

    Sure thats better than a native app.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drnb ( 2434720 )

      Move to Edge Outlook, I mean New Outlook What could be more efficient than Outlook web embedded in an Edge browser? Sure thats better than a native app.

      Aw, I was looking forward to seeing what happened on an ARM based Win11 PC.

    • Or do the obvious.

      Which is so obvious, that I don't even have to say what it is and everyone will know it.

  • The New Outlook is a POS (Score:5, Funny)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Wednesday April 16, 2025 @11:03PM (#65311685)

    It doesn't just lack basic features of Outlook classic, it's the Microsoft Bob version of Outlook.

    • I have thousands of emails in my Inbox. For the 10 minutes I tried New Outlook, the POS kept on loading the emails by small batches, making me scroll to the end of the batch before loading the next. It would have taken me a day to reach the other end.

      • Why would you do that? If you have thousands of emails in your inbox, scrolling through them manually is hardly an efficient way to find something. There is a search feature, and it's not bad, even with thousands of messages to look through.

        Maybe try archiving old emails when you're done reading them. For me, when there's an email in my inbox, it's a thing I need to do. If I'm done with it, I archive it.

        • Not everybody works like that, Tony. Some of us have hundreds of thousands of emails in their inbox (I use flags and read/unread to distinguish things that need attention).

          Also rarely but sometimes you just want to scroll down 8 years back in an instant, just for fun to see what you land on, and delete a random spam email from 2016. That's information freedom.

          • You have an interesting idea of fun! And I'd say that your system doesn't actually work that well for you, since it's causing you grief. All email software, including Thunderbird, has trouble with performance when there are thousands of messages in a single folder.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tokul ( 682258 )

      It is rebranded Windows Mail and personal user data collection software. If account is setup in that piece of dong, Microsoft is accessing user mailbox even when user is not using email application.

    • They got rid of some keys features that I use on a daily basis. Quick parts is gone. They also got rid of the ability to choose what columns appear in the inbox. I want my categories in their own column. This has been a standard option for years. They also took stuff out of the contextual menu so I have to go up to the ribbon for many routine things. The dark mode also looksike shit. At some point my company will probably make us move to the newest version, but I'm not looking forward to it. The task bar in

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Exactly Outlook isnt mail client; or it wasn't it was supposed to be PIM.

      It was the old Schedule+ merged with Microsoft Mail.

      New Outlook only got "tasks" a few months ago in one of the most recent updates. WTF how do you release a calendaring application that does not provide a "todo list" function?

      I don't think the new look is all bad, or that Outlook isn't due for a face lift and alignment with the UI changes that have happened elsewhere in Windows and MacOs, but the failure to maintain even basic feature

    • For me, in a corporate environment, new Outlook is the web version of Outlook. At that point, why should I care about installing some piece of software locally that is basically a browser engine? If you rely on any macro or on any VSTO or COM plugin, forget it.

      New Outlook for personal use (that is probably also a web application too) is the one that asks you to route all your e-mail into Microsoft data centres. Does not look like secure to me.

  • I miss the days of Eudora, Thunderbird, and bring-your-own email client. However, without IMAP/IMAPs, it can be daunting. It would be nice to see a third party client that can handle all the stuff that Outlook does, and work with not just MS, but Apple, Google, Yahoo, Proton, and other major providers. Not just mail, but calendaring, contacts, reminders... all the stuff that is needed for the PHB role.

    As a bonus, store mail in a format that is usable. mbox is okay, maildir is cool on a filesystem that d

  • "No fix" is a pretty good description of Outlook on the whole.

    If you need to do anything beyond type out a plain email, there's no guarantee it will work. (I was going to say "anything but send/receive email" but had to narrow that.)

    Even when there is an official workaround from Microsoft, it won't work around consistently.

    So you're stuck waiting on that bugfix, which might take a year or two. It seems like their strategy is to ignore the problem until they deprecate the software and nebulize you into a clo

  • I don't even know what person thought Outlook (new) was an acceptable product, but even a fully-broken classic Outlook is better than that pile of garbage. I'll take the CPU spikes, thanks.

    • it's cross-platform that's why (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It took a ton of work to maintain Classic Outlook. First, it is a pile of Win32 C code, with a healthy sprinking of "hungarian" notation. It's basically been feature complete for a decade or two, and the crap MSFT loves to do to make people upgrade (basically fucking around with the interface) takes a lot more engineering work than modern APIs do. To make Outlook cross-platform and to reduce the amount of engineering needed to maintain the product they made a webified version of Outlook. Thing is, they also

      • Did you just say that the "new Outlook" doesn't support IMAP?

        Hahah.

        Hahahahahah.

        BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHLMBAO.

        This piece of crap has no place on the computers of our organization. Ever.

      • Re:it's cross-platform that's why (Score:4, Insightful)

        by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Thursday April 17, 2025 @08:39AM (#65312373) Journal

        First, it is a pile of Win32 C code, with a healthy sprinking of "hungarian" notation.

        What is wrong with hungarian notation? I understand that, stylistically, some folks don't like it. But it's not "wrong" or "harder to maintain". (I don't use it in my code, but come across it in legacy code.) But in a time before modern IDEs, it was very helpful in "type hinting" variables and their scope. It's less useful today, now that modern IDEs can dynamically track that across an entire codebase, but at worst that makes hungarian notation obsolete; it all compiles the same.

        Given the abysmal documentation I see from my coworkers' code these days, some hints built into the variable names would be welcome!

        • I'll second this. Hungarian notation, especially in its original form, was used to indicate not just type but also units. This was lost by the OS team that just used it to indicate the raw datatype. Useful in its day (less useful today because IDEs are better), but not as useful as units.

          As an example, if you see the variable "totalTime" and it's an integer... how do you interpret it? How do you compare to another value. If your variable is named msTotalTime, you will much more quickly see that it is in mil

    • Microsoft has lost heir mind. They are taking a car and transforming it into a bicycle for what, so that it has less parts to maintain? They are killing every useful feature and most importantly its extreme utility and customizability with VBA. I wouldn't be surprised of Google takes advantage of this. Gmail by itself is already better than new Outlook. Once everyone is forced to use New Outlook, all Google has to do is make a better offering and make migrating emails over easy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jp10558 ( 748604 )

        Sadly I don't think that's true - first, MS offers huge bundle discounts - start dealing with other platforms and you either have to move *everything* (which you can't cause win32 even though MS for some reason wants to kill the main reason anyone uses Windows), second Google drops products more than MS does, plus it's also calendar and maybe Teams integrations.

        IDK if Google has GovCloud, but there's also generalized data sovereignty - you could run your own on prem Exchange server, you can't with new Outlo

  • The company's sole workaround involves forcing a switch to the Semi-Annual Channel update through registry edits -- an approach many enterprise environments will likely avoid.

    Just curious as to the reason enterprise environments would avoid this. Is it more the Channel switch or the fact it’s accomplished through the registry?

    I certainly hope it is not the latter. Registry changes are not some black magic voodoo. And if the solution is issued by Microsoft, that’s not exactly a risk mitigation effort on par with some reg hack found on 4chan.

    • I'd assume the Channel switch for security update reasons. Pushing out a reg setting is a simple GPO.

  • High time to kick these amateurs to the curb. Any IT infrastrucure with more than a minor part of Microsoft in it has no future.

    • What do you propose as a better option? Yes, MS has its problems, but it's a very capable infrastructure. It's certainly more user friendly, for administrators and end users, than Linux.

      • For administrators, hardly.

        • You would only say this if you've never administered a Microsoft ecosystem. Microsoft has a whole array of controls (InTune) that can be configured centrally, to determine what kinds of things individual users can and can't do, on their own desktop systems or phones, and even on Linux systems within the network. There are some Linux tools that perform similar functions, but they are much more limited and require using multiple products to achieve the same thing you get with InTune. Most of the Linux tools d

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jp10558 ( 748604 )

            InTune's like the new outlook version of GPOs. It's an MDM, and there's like a hundred competitors also in the cloud.

            What I've found - after trying for a decade or so - is that cross platform tools are always "really good" on their main development platform, and various levels of "somewhat passable" to "just a checkbox on marketing fluff" on the others.

            We always seem to end up with tools dedicated to a given OS because because the "almost passable" finally drops below an acceptable level and we give up and

  • "No fix, but here's an effective workaround that basically counts as a fix. So, yeah, I'm not being honest with you when I say there isn't one."
  • 99% this is their UI layout grinding on subpixel rounding errors. MSFT, you can deposit all the wages of the team investigating this into my bank account.
  • The consequences of mixing the OS, the GUI and the app layers into a tight tangled monoculture. A decision made to make it difficult to clone MICROS~1 Windows.
  • and users will be forced onto the "new" Outlook, which is so bad it shouldn't even be considered software in any real sense of the word. In the end, the consumer loses and M$ wins...just like they like it.
  • We need platforms with commitment to be free from AI.

  • MS is in for the Subscription money (Score:3)

    by evolutionary ( 933064 ) on Thursday April 17, 2025 @02:09PM (#65313153)
    Microsoft is no longer making money as an Software Company or OS developer in the traditional sense. That is not where the biggest profits are at. Subscriptions, baby, yeah! Pay in perpetuity for a services that is a commodity. Adobe went that way ages ago (and is reportedly still increasing their fees and graphic designers/artists in the digital field are all but held to ransom). Microsoft has gobbled up GitHub (sad that was allowed), LinkedIn (Biggest HR/Job site around the world) and probably a few hundred others I haven't heard of. Why pay money to maintain an app when there are no new features to justify people paying for another, when they can push people towards a web version, charge a monthly fee and/or collect data to see to various interests? Oh, and then push co-pilot AI at you using their web portal or any other product they want to bill you for. Brilliant. The product that keeps on profiting with minimal (if any) changes over time.Of course people could just stop using MS Windows in 90% of people's typical work day since everyone on the user side being pushed to web service subscriptions anyway (except in some gaming instances). Of course for the moment email is still email. Could always install: * Thunderbird ( https://https//www.thunderbird... [https] ) * Claws ( https://www.claws-mail.org/ [claws-mail.org] )

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