Entourage 2004 - slows my mac mini

[todd]

I have a Mac Mini running System
Mac OSX 10.4.11
My Mac mini is model with 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo

Whenever i run Entourage 2004 or actually any part of the 2004 Suite.
My system comes to a standstill. get the spinning beach ball. even just going from one email to the next causes up to a 5 minute delay.
I have all the current updates to both my system software and to the MS Office Suite for 2004.
Is there a fix that i am not aware of?

I don't know if updating to 10.5 would help OR if updating to Office 2008 would help?
I don't have funds to do BOTH.
Preferably i would like to NOT spend money on any software at all right now.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

 

[Diane Ross]

I have a Mac Mini running System
Mac OSX 10.4.11
My Mac mini is model with 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo

Whenever i run Entourage 2004 or actually any part of the 2004 Suite.
My system comes to a standstill. get the spinning beach ball. even just going
from one email to the next causes up to a 5 minute delay.
I have all the current updates to both my system software and to the MS Office
Suite for 2004.
Is there a fix that i am not aware of?

I don't know if updating to 10.5 would help OR if updating to Office 2008
would help?
I don't have funds to do BOTH.
Preferably i would like to NOT spend money on any software at all right now.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Thanks for including much of your info, but the part you left out will
probably explain your problem. My guess is you have 1 GB or less of memory
and your HD is starting to get full. Installing Leopard would probably make
your problem worse if what I suspect is the cause.

HARD DRIVE:
If your drive is too full or fragmented or you are having memory problems,
you could see:

applications slow to a crawl
have problems installing
experience frequent spinning beach balls
have problems burning CDs
have frequent unexplained freezes


RAM:
Applications and processing on your Mac require physical RAM to work. Buy as
much RAM as you can afford. It's the best present you can give your Mac.
When you run out of RAM, virtual memory allows an operating system to escape
the limitations of physical RAM by using hard disk storage to hold data not
currently in use. This hard disk storage is sometimes called the ³swap²
space because of its use as storage for data being swapping in and out of
memory. Using "swap" space can significantly slow down your Mac.

Suggested RAM for good performance is 4GB for Intel machines. 2GB on PPC.

See this page for more details including how to check:

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/performance2.html>