This week has been an interesting and busy one for me, more so than usual. I’ve had four brand new customers approach me for various things this week — a real scheduling challenge. Yesterday was a good example of how things can get pretty random for me.

I wrapped up my workday at the downtown Chicago offices of a company I do contract IT work for 2-3 days a week. As I was standing on the El platform, waiting for my train to take me home, my cell buzzed that I had a new voicemail. I retrieved the message: it was from somebody crying out for computer help — her boss’ Outlook kept freezing up, and nerves were getting frazzled. She did a Yahoo! search and my web site came back in the results. She was calling every small IT shop trying to get somebody to come over immediately.

Now here is the strange part — pure 100% serendipity. The office with the offending PC was two El stops and a short bus ride away. Not wasting any time, I made the decision to head in their direction, I would call them back when I was near their office. No more than 20 minutes after the time stamp on the original voicemail, I was standing outside their building. I called the assistant, who was quite stunned that I was already at their building. She said her boss had just stepped outside to run an errand and asked for me to wait in the lobby for him to return.

As I waited in the building’s lobby, I ran through the various scenarios in my head that could cause Outlook problems. Was it a virus, spyware or OS issue? Was Outlook corrupted? I put my money on the good old 2gb PST file problem that many of us have seen and had to deal with. As promised, the boss shows up and thanked me for waiting for him. We head up to his office and he briefs me on the problem. With no warning, every time he opens Outlook 2000 (Internet Mail Mode), the program becomes non-responsive after several seconds, and he has to force quit it to use other programs. I hunted down his PST and BINGO it was over 2gb!

So what to do next? Use the Microsoft PST Truncation Tool, which randomly chops off pieces of the PST file until it becomes small enough for Outlook to open it and not lock up? As I started down that road, he informed me that he’d installed the Outlook PST backup utility, and had performed a backup around 2 weeks ago. The backup copy of the PST was, as expected, slightly smaller than the currently used PST. So I did the old “switch-a-roo” and pointed Outlook to the backup PST. Low and behold, Outlook opened up and didn’t freeze. Granted, using this approach, he’d be losing messages downloaded and sent since the date of the backup, but we felt that was better than using the Truncation tool because at least we had an idea of what messages were being lost.

Mind you, Outlook was running very slow, and this PST file was still very much in the danger zone. He had something like 3.5 years of e-mail in his Inbox, amounting to something like 17,000 messages. Ouch! Sent Items folder wasn’t much better. I setup a new Personal Folders file called “Prior Years E-mail” with subfolders for Sent Items 2002… 2003, Inbox 2002, 2003, you get the idea. Then I copied the appropriate messages from the original PST to this new one. This was a long and tedious process. After that was done, I could run a Compact on the original PST to recover the space freed up from that mass exodus. Not so fast, a few minutes into the Compact process, Outlook tells me there is an error with the PST and I’d have to run the Inbox Repair Tool. Marvelous.

I made another backup of this PST file, then I ran the Inbox Repair Tool on it. Phase 1 of 8, and it was clear to me this was going to take forever, with no guarantee of it fixing anything. Shift gears. How about I revert back to the one PST file I know was operational, then copy everything else that wasn’t copied to the “Prior Years” PST into yet another new PST file. Yes, I was getting kind of dizzy at this point, but I felt the outcome would be better than trying to stabilize an existing PST file that had already hit the 2gb limit. Not to mention the fact I wouldn’t have to bother with the Compact command since both new PSTs were built up from scratch. This took roughly another hour to complete. When it was done, I’d essentially split his “backup” PST into two separate PST files, each being much smaller. Whew. It was nearly 10PM!

The client was pretty good about not looking over my shoulder the entire time, but I did tell him what I was doing as I moved from step to step. He was laughing and saying that not being able to do e-mail let him catch up on paperwork he’d been putting off for weeks. The end result was what I had hoped for, he was able to run Outlook without freezing, and it actually seemed faster to him since the PST files weren’t so gargantuan (I love that word). Turns out the client is a nationally known figure in pro sports circles, a highly sought after consultant to teams from nearly every walk of professional sports. Judging from the pictures on the wall, he’s got big time connections. And when all was said and done, he was impressed by my work and had a grocery list of other things he wanted my help with.

I was exhausted by the time I was done, but also excited to have struck up a relationship with a high-profile client whom I predict will have a lot of work for me in the future.