High CPU usage when typing a message in Outlook

Hi Dark Rider,

Totally agree; with your comments.
My experience of Microsoft technical support is that when confirmed the problem is supposed to be "escalated" to the next level of technician. Then, be prepared to wait for weeks, or months.
Hence why I asked Linda (above) whether the problem affects later versions of Office Pro or not ( it might be easier to buy a newer version of Office, than tinkering for weeks). Unfortunately, this question remained unanswered. Would be interesting to know if later versions of Office are affected, too.

Note: In your previous correspondence, you mentioned that the problem also affects Win 10. I have another machine running on Win 10 Pro, where Office 2K16 Pro is installed, but could not reproduce the problem on this machine. Strange.

Dear Pascal,

yes, for sure you can prepare and type your e-mails in other programs and just finally and quickly copy the content to Outlook so that Outlook only causes high CPU load for a short time, but that's not really the way how it should be.

I guess Microsoft will not fix this for a very long time again, because most users are not aware of the very high, totally unnecessary CPU usage caused by Outlook during typing e-mails. And that users who are aware in most cases won't report the problem to anyone. The rate of complaints unfortunately will be extremely small in this case, although the effect of the bug is huge (the total energy consumption caused by just this stupid bug and Microsoft ignoring this will be tremendous).

Here are already 5 users who found this posting (what's not so easy) and who confirmed to have the same problem (what not everybody will do). So I'm sure that nearly all = many millions of users will be concerned.

Here is a (dumb) solution to somehow circumvent the problem: I type the mail into Notepad (Window 11 Notepad has a spellcheck) as a buffer, and then paste the resulting text into Outlook. This way the processor does not go red hot as you type into Outlook.

Another solution is to use Word 2K16 to type your message. Surprisingly Word does not exhibit this high CPU usage problem as you type.

Yet, Outlook uses Word engine in its editing mode....

Hello,

I can confirm exactly the same problem as Pascal described, high CPU usage caused by Outlook during typing an e-mail.

But at my side, the problem occurs as well on Windows 11 as also on Windows 10.

We use Office from Microsoft 365, current channel (2410, now 2411). Rollbacks to 2409, 2408 and 2406 did not solve the problem, but the problem started to appear from September on, so the reason may be something different.

There already was a similar problem with high CPU load caused by Outlook from 2021-2023, when opening new attachments: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/outlook-causes-high-cpu-usage-for-2-3-minutes-each/fa903250-4bd2-4517-942c-fe77b4c6f3c3

Contacts with "customer support" from Microsoft just caused extremely much work (try this and try that, send this and send that data), but no help, because these guys only try to look for mistakes at user's side and cannot imagine that there may be a bug at Microsoft's side.

They also cannot even try to reproduce the problem theirselves, because they don't have the software at all and just pretend that you would be the only one with this problem.

So please dispense with new askings for data, please finally reproduce the problem yourselves at Microsoft and please fix this bug quicker then in 2 years this time!

Hi There,

I am seeing this exact problem as of november this year.

In VDI environments or on dedicated user devices. While composing message CPU spikes up to approx 25% and stays there until the mail is sent or closed.

Running build 18129.20158

Any ideas?