Powerpoint slow and hangs under Tiger (OSX 10.4.2)

[jmberger]

Hi - I have seen one other (unresponded) message on this newsgroup
similar to this problem, but I thought I would post my observations to
see if there are workarounds.

I have been experiencing marked slowdowns and hangs in PowerPoint 2004
(v. 11.2) running under Tiger (OSX 10.4.2). The issue arises when
opening presentations containing slides that were saved from PP 2004 or
PP X running under versions of the Mac OS dating to 10.3 or earlier.

PowerPoint initially opens quickly. However, it temporarily freezes if
I switch to a new slide from the opening slide, switch between
slideviewer modes, or if I give it certain user commands (such as
changning font size). Once I get past about 4-7 minutes of intermitant
'spinning beach balls', the program becomes more responsive, though it
does show a slightly increased tendency to crash over previous
versions. During the hangs, the Mac activity monitor lists PP as "not
responding", and an inspection of the process shows multiple "recent
hangs" and 200,000 or more "faults". Curiously, after PP settles down,
the CPU monitor also begins to show odd, intermitant spikes, and
oscillates regularly between ~10 and 70% of total CPU capacity. These
spikes disappear when I quit PP.

My typcial presentation is about 50MB, and contains numerous Tiff and
PNG images, multiple powerpoint animations, and a few quicktime movies.
I am using a 1.25 GHz PowerBook G4 with 1.5 GB RAM and the latest
version OSX (including security patches). I did not see this problem
with PP under 10.3.8 - I waited to jump to Tiger until 10.4.2 was
ready, and the problems began immediately.

Any help appreciated. Thanks in advance,

James

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi,

Did any of your computer's sleep settings change when you updated to
Tiger? Did you do run any disk utilities after the udpate (repair
permissions, DiskWarrior, etc)?

Is your startup disk the built-in hard drive? Do you have other drives
attached to your computer?

I ask all of this because if the OS is not performing properly then it
can appear that PowerPoint is sluggish, when PowerPoint might not even
be involved.

-Jim

 

[FartBast]

Hello I'm a nobody that will tell his story.
Basically PP2004 does not run well in OSX. (10.3 or 10.4) - it uses u
loads of CPU power and is prone to freezing (when put under an
pressure).. It's strange that you noticed it only in upgrading t
10.4.2.
In comparison (on my iBook G4 800) the Office vs. X version of PP work
fine on 10.3 and 10.4.
In order to actually do work I keep the copy of Office vs X PP on th
Hard drive - constantly hoping the next PP2004 upgrade will improve th
situation...


No offence intended to Microsoft employees ..

 

[JRSF]

Hello I'm a nobody that will tell his story. Basically PP2004
does not run well in OSX. (10.3 or 10.4) - it > uses up loads of CPU power and is prone to freezing
when put under any
pressure).. It's strange that you noticed it only in upgrading to
10.4.2. In comparison (on my iBook G4 800) the Office vs. X version of PP works
fine on 10.3 and 10.4. In order to actually do work I keep the copy of Office vs X PP on the
Hard drive - constantly hoping the next PP2004 upgrade will improve the situation...

I reported similar behavior some time ago, see:

http://groups.google.com/group/micr...erpoint/browse_thread/thread/580cfb96be9ebc77

I too am looking for a new upgrade of MS-PPT that will revive the
speedy action of animated objects like that of PPT Classic and or
PPT-2004 in Panther. Object response is annoying slower in Tiger. This
sluggish behavior is independent of whether I happen to have a second
hard drive connected. Upon increasing the RAM of my G$ titanium laptop
from 256 mb to 568 mb the sluggishness persisted.

 

[jmberger]

Hi Jim (and others), thanks for your response(s).

My sleep settings did not change when I updated to Tiger (nor did any
network settings, etc. as far as I can tell). I initially did not run
any disk utilities, but after fussing with the slow-down for a while, I
did try such (unsuccessfully). My hard drive is built into my laptop -
no other drives are attached. I even went so far to scour my disk and
remove previous Office installations via the Remove Office application
(reading on some post that this can be a problem), also to no avail...

JMB

 

[FartBast]

the situation...


I reported similar behavior some time ago, see:

http://tinyurl.com/9ygvo

I too am looking for a new upgrade of MS-PPT that will revive the
speedy action of animated objects like that of PPT Classic and or
PPT-2004 in Panther. Object response is annoying slower in Tiger. This
sluggish behavior is independent of whether I happen to have a second
hard drive connected. Upon increasing the RAM of my G$ titanium laptop
from 256 mb to 568 mb the sluggishness persisted.

I guess it might be the slightly extra system reserves being used up i
Tiger services cf Panther (e.g. spotlight - indexing that extr
hard-drive) that takes it over the edge wrt the performancefor you i
10.4. The fact remains PP2004 should be operational on systems wit
less power!... If you stick max-menus running you'll see the processo
is saturated when PP2004 is frozen.

 

[dglover]

JMB,

I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone. This has been an
issue for me and other users that have made the transition to Tiger. The
hangup time and slowness while editing powerpont has dramatically increased
with 50mb+ slideshows containing images and movieclips. We are still in
search of a solution.

 

[googmeister]

JMB,

I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone. This has been an
issue for me and other users that have made the transition to Tiger. The
hangup time and slowness while editing powerpont has dramatically increased
with 50mb+ slideshows containing images and movieclips. We are still in
search of a solution.

Yes, I've been experiencing some of the same problems. It's not limited
to 50MB files. I've got 1MB files that are very slow to save and
annoyingly
slow to even page down through the slides in standard mode on my dual
G5.
The transition effects on my 400MhZ powerbook are too slow to be useful
for me. I hope these problems get diagnosed and fixed soon. On the
other
hand, I have fewer crashes with Office 2004 than Office X.