deleting plist files
16/01/09 Filed in: general troubleshooting
Question: I have one other advice question. My otherwise fast desktop at the office is PAINFULLY slow in Entourage. I go to the application and it’s 15 seconds before I get a screen. If I switch from emails to address book, it’s another 10 seconds (sounds like this is a ridiculous time to be complaining about, but in real time it’s awful). I can’t figure out what’s up. Any suggestion? Bob
Answer: First, it’s always a good idea to try using the same applications from a different user. A test user that you may have previously set up on your machine. But it’s not too late. System preferences: accounts: new user. Now log in under that user and use the apps from there. If the same problem exists it’s a more serious issue but most likely the problem doesn’t exist in the seperate user in this case. If not, then return to the other user after logging out and time to pull some plist files. Go to ~/user/library/prefences (~means the root level of the drive) Careful not to confuse the main computer library with the library folder inside your user folder. Now that you’re in your user’s preferences folder be sure you’ve quit all open applications. Next, find the potentially offending .plist file and take it out of this folder. Drop it onto the desktop for now and then restart the application. 9 times out of 10 this usually resolves the problem.
Things to note:
While most application’s .plist files contain mostly unimportant data that can become corroupt occasionally, there is one app that you don’t want to use this technique with. Mail.app. Do not use this technique when troubleshooting mail.app because in some versions of the app, the .plist file for mail.app contains critical email account info that you’d be very unhappy without.
Common apple software’s .plist files are usually named as follows. com.apple.(name of application).plist. However, other software’s .plist files often come in many flavors. In microsoft’s case (as well as many other developers) some plist files are within subfolders inside the preferences folder.
More specifically related to your question, Entourage relies on the Microsoft User data folder that resides in your user’s documents folder. It’s a huge bloated bundle of files that often are compiled by Office and are very often more the case of the problem. These files can grow very large and bog Entourage down. If you delete these files however, you will loose your email history. So I would suggest trying the .plist fix first.
-Scotty
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