Slow startup times

[John McGhie]

Ummm... On which planet is this observation "accurate"?

Is the weather nice there?

Like any other computer software, Apple OS 10.5 and Office 2008 have some
bugs that need fixing. One of them is causing Ryan's problem.

For the rest of us, Office 2008 is faster than Office 2004 which was faster
than Office X, on an adequately-specified machine with 2GB of memory.

The same as Word 2003 was faster than Word 2000, and Word 2007 is MUCH
faster than Word 203, on an adequate machine.

iWork may be faster for short, simple documents. But those are not what
people buy Microsoft Office to produce

Cheers

It is an accurate observation that office 2008 for mac is slow, so is office
2007 for xp - in comparison to older versions. Speed is relative and depends
on your configuration, but in pretty much all cases the newer the MS
application the slower it will run on your current system. Office is bloated
with features 99% of us will never use.

Solution: Unless you absolutely must use office to communicate within your
company (Entourage etc) don't use it. Apples iWork including "pages",
"Numbers" and "Keynotes" is a 100 times faster, easier to use yet full of
advanced features and they read and can edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

As an individual user not bound by company policies, it is idiotic to use
Office way too expensive and full of nonsense.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia

 

[Faisal]

Dear All,
It is like this with me also, Please if anyone got a solution of that, please post it for us.

Regards,,

 

[John McGhie]

Many users are reporting very slow start-up times with OS 10.5.2.

This is a bug, and we are hoping for a fix sometime next month.

The only other thing you could do is to roll back to OS 10.4. Word takes
about five seconds to start in OS 10.4.11.

Hope this helps

Dear All,
It is like this with me also, Please if anyone got a solution of that, please
post it for us.

Regards,,

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia

 

[Robby]

The fix is critical. Priority A1.

It seems you have done a nice work with the apps, but by the time they open I have already done the job with iWork alternatives. So I haven't had the chance to test Office 2008 yet: when it opens I don't need it anymore.

Un abrazo,
Robby!

 

[Ryan]

Yeah, if this update that is coming out by March 11 doesn't fix this issue... IT WILL HIT THE FAN IN THE MAC COMMUNITY! I WILL BE THE FIRST TO CALL IN AND DEMAND MY MONEY BACK AND THEN GIVE THAT MONEY RIGHT TO APPLE FOR "PAGES"

 

[John McGhie]

Guys, guys, PLEASE!!

I understand your emotion, but seriously... You're shouting at the wrong
people.

This is an Apple bug. And it will be fixed by Apple. When and if they feel
like it

In here, you are talking to other users. We paid for our software, just
like you did. One of us work for Microsoft. I can't see how your decision
to ask for your money back, or why we need to know what someone in the Mac
Community may or may not write in their blog. Am I missing a point here?

We're out here just trying to get our work done, same as you. We will make
our decisions according to what works for us, same as you. When we get some
knowledge we think others may benefit from, we try to share it in here. Is
that what you are doing too?

If you have a message for Microsoft, use the Help>Send Feedback mechanism to
send it in. That way it will get to someone paid to read and record it.

But please ‹- not in here Microsoft isn't looking here! At least: the
Microsoft people who sometimes appear in here, are doing so outside of their
normal duties, often in their own time, because they are working on specific
issues.

If they post at all, it's because they are trying to do us a favour: they
don't have to, and they don't get paid for the time they spend doing it. So
be nice ‹ don't shout at them while they are trying to do us a good turn

Cheers

Yeah, if this update that is coming out by March 11 doesn't fix this issue...
IT WILL HIT THE FAN IN THE MAC COMMUNITY! I WILL BE THE FIRST TO CALL IN AND
DEMAND MY MONEY BACK AND THEN GIVE THAT MONEY RIGHT TO APPLE FOR "PAGES"

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50

 

[pjones]

Hi, I was just wondering if anyone has discovered a solution or a workaround for this problem yet. I am experiencing the exact same symptoms Ryan outlined above.

I've followed all the suggestions in this thread, yet I'm still experiencing 3+ minute launch times with Word. (I haven't tried Excel or Powerpoint)

I'm on a MBP 2.16 Core 2 Duo with 2 GB ram, running OS X 10.5.2. BTW, thanks for all the informative posts so far.

Paul

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Someone elsewhere posted that turning off global auto font activation in
Suitcase (I might have the exact wording wrong) worked wonders for Word.
Applicable to you?

 

[pjones]

Thanks for the idea, but it's unfortunately not applicable in my case. I just stumbled across this thread while searching yesterda, and saw that nobody had posted for a while. I was wondering if any fixes had been discovered during the last month.

Thanks

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

That's the only fix discovered.

Thanks for the idea, but it's unfortunately not applicable in my case. I just stumbled across this thread while searching yesterda, and saw that nobody had posted for a while. I was wondering if any fixes had been discovered during the last month.

Thanks

 

[pjones]

Let me preface this post by saying that I am in no way intending to be inflammatory.

Does anyone have a clue if this problem is widespread enough to be a priority for Microsoft and Apple to fix? A 3 1/2 minute startup time is sufficient cause for me to seek other word-processing solutions. Since a fix for this problem wasn't included in the most recent Office update, I have no idea whether to expect this to get fixed in a couple of weeks, months, or more.

Do you think there's any hope of this disappearing soon, or am I one of only a few experiencing it?

Thanks

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I don't want to be inflammatory, either--but what good is our
speculation here going to do you?

In general--MS/Apple/any software company can only fix a problem when
they know what is causing it. They can't fix symptoms. There are so many
different manifestations and fixes reported here already, it hits people
with the same setup in varying degrees and sometimes not at all--so it's
clear that the cause is not easy to pin down, and there are probably
multiple causes. How hard they are working on it is no guarantee of
whether they will find and fix the particular aspect of the problem that
is affecting you. This is just common sense, no special knowledge.

I will say that, because patches/updates have to be tested and used
internally to make sure they can be released safely, you shouldn't
expect a very fast update schedule. A couple of weeks from now would be
about 1 month after the last update--that seems too soon to me. The
first update came 2 months after launch and more like 3 months after MS
sent the program to manufacturing to print the dvds. Here I'm
speculating based on information MacBUers have blogged about.

 

[pjones]

Thanks.. that's all I was looking for: more well-informed speculation than I'm capable of. I'm sure this is a stupid question, but do you think something as simple as reinstalling office could fix this?

 

[CyberTaz]

Sorry, but the likelihood of any

Thanks.. that's all I was looking for: more well-informed speculation than I'm
capable of. I'm sure this is a stupid question, but do you think something as
simple as reinstalling office could fix this?

 

[CyberTaz]

Sorry, but the likelihood of gaining any improvement by reinstalling Office
ranks at about .02 on a scale of 1 ­ 10. Based on everything I¹ve seen you¹d
be better off reinstalling Tiger or reverting to the base 10.5.0 version of
Leopard. The problem did not surface until the release of the 10.5.*2*
Leopard update. As mentioned several times in this thread, alone, the issue
is not endemic to Office. If it could be resolved by waving an install disk
at it I¹m certain someone would have told you so.

I have 2008 (12.0.1) running in Tiger 10.4.11 on a G5 & in Leopard 10.5.0 on
an Intel MacBook Pro. Neither installation takes more than ~8 seconds to
fully launch even after a cold startup. Can I assure you that you¹ll see the
same results if you go back to 10.4.11 or 10.5.0 ­ absolutely not, but it
does lend credence the assertion that it is not an inherent failing of
Office 2008.

Just make sure that your system is clean of any ³toys² that might inhibit
the performance of your Mac or Office, that you¹ve repaired disk permissions
& that ou don¹t leave any of the Office apps running 24/7 ­ restart them *at
least* once a day.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Magusjosh]

I've seen a number of people saying that this is 10.5.2 specific...I'm afraid that's not entirely true. I'm supporting a client whose machines are running 10.4.11, and they're having exactly this problem on all but two of their machines. The two machines that aren't experiencing the problem are PPC, the rest are various Intel systems. NONE of their machines are running any version of Leopard.

I plan to try many of the solutions mentioned above, but have already cleared out the Normal template, old and new Office prefs, and disabled the WYSIWYG Font list and Project Gallery at Startup without any success.

Launch times are insanely long, 5-7 minutes in some cases. If I have any success, I'll let you know.

 

[John McGhie]

There are TWO "Slow Startup" bugs hanging around.

The one in this thread is a conflict caused by global font auto activation.
It afflicts users of Extensis Suitcase, pre- the Extensis patch, really
badly.

I believe that bug is only applicable to OS 10.5. Because global font auto
activation did not appear until 10.5. Hmmm... Did Extensis Suitcase support
global font auto activation prior to OS 10.5?

The other bug is caused by corruption in old Office 2004 resources getting
sucked in to Office 2008 during installation.

If you remove Office 2008, then move the MUD folder to the desktop and then
purge all the old preferences, then install 2008, it should go away.

You can then put the stuff in the MUD folder back if you still need it.

I think you have the second issue, not the first. In which case, try what I
just suggested, and come back for more ideas.

Hope this helps

I've seen a number of people saying that this is 10.5.2 specific...I'm afraid
that's not entirely true. I'm supporting a client whose machines are running
10.4.11, and they're having exactly this problem on all but two of their
machines. The two machines that aren't experiencing the problem are PPC, the
rest are various Intel systems. NONE of their machines are running any version
of Leopard.

I plan to try many of the solutions mentioned above, but have already cleared
out the Normal template, old and new Office prefs, and disabled the WYSIWYG
Font list and Project Gallery at Startup without any success.

Launch times are insanely long, 5-7 minutes in some cases. If I have any
success, I'll let you know.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[limsilas]

original poster NB seems to have disappeared,

but i'm having the exact same problem as him: 10.5.2, word 2008 takes
about 58 seconds to startup cold, then 28 seconds after that,

but in a fresh GUEST account it only takes 6 seconds!

in my user/library/fonts folder i only have 16 fonts; disabling them
via fontbook makes no difference.

i don't have or use suitcase.

i also have a folder called "fontcollections" in user/library, with 12
collections.

in my library/fonts i have 153 fonts, but i also have a strange folder
in there called "microsoft," whose contents in some instances
duplicate the fonts in its parent folder.

but my GUEST account should access all of these same fonts since it's
in the root's library, right? so why is it so much faster?

 

[John McGhie]

This is a very frustrating clash between Word 2008 and OS 10.5.2.

If you try the suggestions in the rest of this thread, one of them may work
for you.

But basically, we're waiting on a fix for this one.

Cheers

original poster NB seems to have disappeared,

but i'm having the exact same problem as him: 10.5.2, word 2008 takes
about 58 seconds to startup cold, then 28 seconds after that,

but in a fresh GUEST account it only takes 6 seconds!

in my user/library/fonts folder i only have 16 fonts; disabling them
via fontbook makes no difference.

i don't have or use suitcase.

i also have a folder called "fontcollections" in user/library, with 12
collections.

in my library/fonts i have 153 fonts, but i also have a strange folder
in there called "microsoft," whose contents in some instances
duplicate the fonts in its parent folder.

but my GUEST account should access all of these same fonts since it's
in the root's library, right? so why is it so much faster?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[Firebrain]

10.5.3 solves it! Although the initial startup time is still a lil bit worse (Macbook 1,1/1,83GHz/2GB) Word runs fast.
No more waiting. :smile: