I’m routinely impressed by how helpful and knowledgeable our forum visitors are. Today I offer the example of one Larryw, who — out of the pure goodness of his heart — offered up this tip that has made my computing more enjoyable. In this Mac 911 forum thread he posted:
If you’re having problems with regular hangs/pauses in Entourage; hangs that tie up the application with periods of heavy disk activity, try turning off the background database check.Launch Entourage while holding down the Option key; Database Manager is launched instead.
Click Set Database Preferences.
Uncheck background integrity checks.
I’ve been running like this for 2 weeks now with no hangs/pauses; contrasted with 2-3X/day in the past (4GB database). Contrary to Microsoft’s suggested fix, I have Spotlight enabled for Entourage.
Since the background check is disabled, it is probably a good idea to run that every now and then.
Dan Frakes and I were having a virtual water-cooler chat about this just the other day — each of us noting that the one thing we really hated about Entourage running on our Intel Mac Pros is its habit of occasionally devouring the processor for no apparent reason. Since I’ve implemented Mr. W’s tip, Entourage has kept its appetite in check.
Nice work, Larry!