Fixing Outlook Hangs and Restarts on a Surface Pro 4

I’ve had this annoying problem where Outlook 2016 is constantly hanging, crashing, or restarting, but only my Surface Pro 4. I tried the various methods of running in Safe mode, disabling add-ons, etc., to attempt a quick fix for the problem. Finally, I became fed-up enough to ask for help.

Thankfully, Stanislav Zhelyazkov came to the rescue on Twitter and supplied a non-obvious settings change in Microsoft Outlook that has worked. Apparently, the video driver for the Surface Pro 4 may be the culprit, and turning off graphics acceleration in Outlook 2016 has finally solved the issue.

If you’re experiencing problems like this, you can try turning graphics acceleration yourself by going to File-Options-Mail-Editor Options-Advanced-Display.

Incidentally, when you turn graphics acceleration off in one Microsoft Office 2016 application, it turns it off for all applications in the suite – and that’s probably a good thing considering it’s a video driver problem that would eventually cause issues elsewhere.

The interesting piece to this fix (to me) is that both Microsoft Office and the Surface Pro 4 are Microsoft products. Shouldn’t they work better together than this?

Incidentally, this is a fix for a graphics driver problem, so it’s not exclusive to the Surface Pro 4. This may help solve any Outlook or Office application problem where there are constant hangs, crashes, and restarts.

I also want to thank Marko Loukkaanhuhta and Tero Alhonen for their help.