Upgraded both of my macs to Office 2004 and wish I could have Office x back! Any help?!?!

S

sunrise

Hi,

I am running a G5 Imac 1.8Ghz and a G4 Powerbook 1.5GHz and have been
happily running office X on both machines for as long as I've owned
them (1 and 2 years respectively) Before the Pbook, I also had an I
book running Office X for 18 months with no troubles.

I just installed Office 2004 2 weeks ago, and am consistently noticing,
on both machines, serious system slowdown over the course of the day.
To the point where, by mid-afternooon, my system needs to be restarted.
The symptoms are identical on both macs (naturally the Pbook runs even
slower than the G5 as these problems advance).

My day consists of using entourage extensively all day long, Word and
Excel sporadically, and Firefox and/or Safari, usually with quite a few
tabs open at once. A day rarley goes by that I don't run two or three
searches in Entourage, tackling a database of about 8000 messages, if I
choose to search the root folder...

Under my normal useage as desctribed, everthing ran smoothly over the
past 3 years with Office X as the cornerstone of my operations.
NOW....with office 2004 my macs are, by mid day, choking on something.
I can't switch readily between tabs in my browsers, and eventually the
browsers seem to almost lock up if I work a long enough day (and browse
a handful of sites). The only thing that prevents this behavior is
running an entire session without ever launching any office 2004
products (like a weekend day spend browsing the web instead of working
on projects that require office). On those days it's as though nothing
has changed.

My gut feeling is that there is a failure in 2004 to allocate memory
properly (is microsoft being a "hog" in this case??) and more
importantly, release memory when it's no longer used.

I consider myself a slightly advanced user, but this one seems like a
deeper problem than I am able to solve with a few settings adjusted...
The mac is almost behaving as though it's infected with some of the
overwrought elements one finds in a Windows XP machine (Anecdotally: I
once was a Windows user...ever tried their system search in XP (the one
with the puppy)? -It always made me long, desperately, for the at
least 100% faster search that ran in Windows 98...)

My work life was less complicated prior to this "upgrade"....so I'm
seriously thinking about getting back to office X so that I can have
both macs perfoming again, all the live-long day!

Does anyone know how to move Entourage databases back to Office X, and
if so, what might be lost in the process??

Thanks,
Dave
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

Hi,
My gut feeling is that there is a failure in 2004 to allocate memory
properly (is microsoft being a "hog" in this case??) and more
importantly, release memory when it's no longer used.

I've never noticed anything like that with my setup. I would make sure
Office 2004 is perfectly up to date and repair permissions with Disk
Utility.
If you want to monitor Office apps, I would recommend using the Activity
monitor. It will tell you exactly what apps are using all the CPU and
memory.

Corentin
 
C

CyberTaz

What version of OS X are you running?

How's your available HD free space?

Are you using a synched iDisk or is journaling enabled?

BTW-
My gut feeling is that there is a failure in 2004 to allocate memory
properly (is microsoft being a "hog" in this case??) and more
importantly, release memory when it's no longer used.

I believe this is all handled by OS X, unlike prior versions where
memory requirements were dictated by the apps. FWIW, my 'gut feeling'
is that this is more likely an OS/hardware issue rather than an Office
issue.

I run 2004 on a G5 Dual 2GB, 1.5GB RAM and it isn't uncommon for me to
have Safari, Apple Mail, Word, Excel, Entourage & either PhotoShop
CS/CS2 or InDesign CS/CS2 (sometimes both) running concurrently with
_no_ degradation in performance. I use Entourage only as a newsreader,
so I don't have the quantity of email/db you refer to, but that could
be a contributing factor.

Regards |:>)
 
S

sunrise

Thanks, Office is indeed up to date. I'll give your other suggestions
a try!

Here's one mystery detail about both of my macs: I have never been
able to run Activity monitor on either one. It bounces a couple of
times in the dock and then dissapears! This has always been the
case... Ever heard of such a thing?
 
S

sunrise

OS 10.3.9

Over 100GB free on the Imac

Only around 5-10GB free on the pBook

Both have 1.25GB RAM

No Sync'd Idisk, No Journaling enabled.

I failed to mention I also use Photoshop and Illustrator daily as well.
Always without complaint until this upgrade of Office...

What prompted me to write was that the downgrade in performance
happened on both machines with this upgrade. I can still run most apps
fine, but invariably my web-based apps start to get boggy at the end of
the day...

I'll try Corentin's tip of repairing permissions...
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

sunrise said:
Here's one mystery detail about both of my macs: I have never been
able to run Activity monitor on either one. It bounces a couple of
times in the dock and then dissapears! This has always been the
case... Ever heard of such a thing?

Yep... Try repairing Permissions (using DiskUtility). That doesn't sound
too good... If you have a disk repair utility, you should give it a try
too. If you don;t, boot on your MacOS X install CD/DVD and run
DiskUtility from there o check your drive. THere is something fishy in
your install :-\


Corentin
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

sunrise said:
No Sync'd Idisk, No Journaling enabled.


Why don't you use journalling ?? Any specific reason ??
Safety-wise, journalling is pretty nice...

Corentin
 
A

Andrew Chiang [MSFT]

As an alternative to running Activity Monitor, you can always run the Unix
utility top . See http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/lackofram.html under
"Determine how much paging your system is performing" for instructions.

To get more help on top's command line switches, do a "man top" [w/o quotes]
while in Terminal. For example, "top -ocpu" will give you a list sorted by
CPU usage. I'd be curious to know if something is chewing up CPU time when
you hit your slowdowns. I'd also be curious to know if the number within
parenthesis right before pageouts is consistently high (say 25 or greater)
while you're hitting slowdowns. The numbering I'm referring is 25 in this
example:

7420(25) pageouts

Andrew
 

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