Mac programs run fine, Word Mac doesn't: why?

[Marian]

First real problem with my G4 powerbook. Itunes and imovie are running
fine. Yet Microsoft Word Mac is *really* slow (2-5 second delay for
any key I press, which is a real headache for typing), plus the scroll
bar is jerky. I called the London Drugs retailer from whom I bought
the 12" powerbook and was told that I need more RAM, that the Mac
programs are running fine because they are designed for Mac whereas
the Word Mac is a cross-over program. He suggested I call Microsoft.

Microsoft tells me that because I have a free trial version they can't
give me any tech support. The minimum system requirement are exceeded
(G3 - I have a G4; OSX - I have OSX.3; 196 Hard drive - I have over
30 Gigs left; 128 meg Ram - I have 246). So it should work, but it
does only nominally.

The retailer said that buying 512 Ram would improve but he could make
no gurarantees that it will run perfectly smoothly. Any ideas how to
solve this software problem?

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Marian:

I am running Word 2004 here on an iBook 14" 1.2 GHz G4 with 256 MB of RAM.
Performance is fine for short documents.

The retailer is correct: More memory will massively improve performance on
that system. So will learning to Quit applications you are not actually
using. Learn to Command + q things instead of must dismissing them. Memory
fragmentation is no longer much of a problem in OS X, so the original reason
for leaving everything running in OS 9 has gone away.

But for documents more complex than short Office documents, 256 is just not
enough memory if you have Word and Entourage and four or five other
applications all running together, even if all but Word are minimised.
While they are minimised, the applications are still loaded into, and
consuming, memory.

As soon as funds permit, I will lift the memory on this box to 1 GB, and I
strongly recommend that you do too.

Regards

First real problem with my G4 powerbook. Itunes and imovie are running
fine. Yet Microsoft Word Mac is *really* slow (2-5 second delay for
any key I press, which is a real headache for typing), plus the scroll
bar is jerky. I called the London Drugs retailer from whom I bought
the 12" powerbook and was told that I need more RAM, that the Mac
programs are running fine because they are designed for Mac whereas
the Word Mac is a cross-over program. He suggested I call Microsoft.

Microsoft tells me that because I have a free trial version they can't
give me any tech support. The minimum system requirement are exceeded
(G3 - I have a G4; OSX - I have OSX.3; 196 Hard drive - I have over
30 Gigs left; 128 meg Ram - I have 246). So it should work, but it
does only nominally.

The retailer said that buying 512 Ram would improve but he could make
no gurarantees that it will run perfectly smoothly. Any ideas how to
solve this software problem?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[Bill Weylock]

Marian -

256megs of RAM is not enough. It's not really enough even to run OS X, much
less Office programs.

Can it work? Yeah. Can it work well? No.

You have to get more RAM. 512 is the least you should have, and more would
be smarter if you are going to keep the PB for any length of time.

 

[Marian]

Perhaps the fact that I was typing 300 page documents was a factor.
Thanks for the advice.