Dell bloatware slows down Microsoft Outlook

I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron E1405 Notebook loaded with Windows XP Professional and Office 2003 Professional. Everything on the notebook worked as expected, except Microsoft Outlook 2003. Almost every task in Outlook took much longer than expected, especially when opening calendar events or displaying reminders. Turns out the fix was removing software pre-installed by Dell…Thanks Dude!

It took me a good while to figure this out. First I repaired and re-installed Office 2003 and tried re-importing my PST file. Neither of which fixed the problem. I also tried leaving out the calendar portion during my PST import (oddly enough, that helped a little), but Outlook still didn’t respond how a 2.16Ghz notebook with 2GB of ram should. Some task in Outlook felt slower than on my old Gateway notebook with 512MB RAM and a 1.3Ghz Pentium M.

I decided to do a “clean” install of Office by removing any and all MS Office related software packages, when I ran across an “outlookaddin” item by Cyberlink in the Add/Remove Programs control panel. I didn’t see any use for it and uninstalled it. Just for jokes, I tried Outlook again and what do you know? The problem was Gone! I did some more research into this “Cyberlink Outlookaddin” and found several articles describing similar problems with Outlook 2007 and the same add-in, but none really explained what it was for or why it was pre-installed by Dell.

Some articles implied that the software was a remnant of the software preloading process at Dell, some claimed that it was spyware. I contacted Dell support for clarification of what the software was for and the first technician couldn’t find any software named “outlookaddin” on their internal knowledge-base, the second technician was useless and didn’t understand what I wanted to know.

Either way, I’m happy to say that Outlook 2003 now works like it should again and I’ve decided to keep my Dell notebook.