Why does Word:mac take so long to start up as compared to Windows?

[Marc]

I'm considering switching from PC to Mac, and I've noticed extremely long
startup times for Microsoft Office products, such as Word and Excel, on Mac
computers, including the new MacBook Pro.

Word takes less than one second to startup on my PC (two years old, running
a 1.2 GhZ Pemtium M). It should take a lot less time on a new mac running a
2 GhZ Intel Core Duo. Why doesn't it? Is there anything I can do to speed it
up?

 

[CyberTaz]

One reason: Mac Office doesn't run natively on Intel Macs - it runs through
the Rosetta emulator, so startup will be slower than you may prefer, but all
reports I've seen indicate that the programs run well once launched. Once a
universal binary version of Office is released I'm certain you will see a
dramatic increase.

Other considerations are that the if the systems you're looking at are
in-store displays they may have only stock RAM, might not be very well
maintained, and are subject to other factors that may inhibit performance.

Also, as a PC-user-too, I have to challenge your "less than one second" to
launch Word on a Windows machine... Restore it from the Task Bar, perhaps,
if it has already been launched, but not a 'cold' start

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

 

[mmmmark]

Winword does start TONS faster than 2004 on a Mac, EVEN if the "optimizing
font menu" DOESN'T show up.

Once it's running, it does ok, but some things are still pretty slow. I
think it is due to the large quantity of "legacy" and carbon-based code.
I'm hoping the next version will be faster, but then again, it will be the
new Office formats, so it may not.

Stay tuned and find out! ;-)

 

[Marc]

Thanks for the information. I appreciate it.

I'm not sure if your PC system has a lot of background processes running or
a slower processor, but on my two-year-old crappy Dell Pentium M, Word takes
about one second to load, from the time I double-click, to the time I see a
blank document with a blinking cursor ready for typing. And no, I'm not
talking about maximizing it from the system tray, I'm talking about starting
the program fresh.

I'm just dismayed that it takes so long on the Mac. It's really annoying me
to wait while programs load, and I'm not sure if I should have switched.

 

[John McGhie]

Yes, WinWord 2003 does "apparently" start faster on a PC. That's
because:

* Usually, it's already running PCs using Word are also usually
using Outlook, and Outlook starts a hidden instance of Word when it
opens. So Word is already running in the background.

* On the PC, the system loads the fonts, not the application, so
there's no fiddling around with fonts on application launch.

Of course, everything the others say is also true: on an Intel Mac,
you are not running Word as native code, you are running it through an
emulator. This reduces performance by about 75 per cent.

And modern desktop PCs usually go faster than the current MacIntels.
Apple purposly held the clock and bus speeds down on the current
versions to keep the heat and battery life under control.

Someone in France (no, I don't think it was Corentin...) has just done
an interesting hack: running the latest ATI drivers on a MacIntel, he
managed to crank the clock speed up to the limits specified by Intel
and ATI. In doing so, he improved performance from 60-odd frames per
second to 90-odd. There's no word yet on whether his machine has now
melted... Seriously, people: DON'T try this at home, you WILL melt
your processor unless you really know what you're doing...

On the new iMacs, things move along quite a bit faster because it has
a faster hard disk and a faster system bus. But it's still not as
quick as the current crop of 3 GHz Pentiums out there.

When Apple starts offering the go-faster Intel Zeons with their 1066
MHz front side bus and 15,000 RPM SATA drives, and Microsoft issues
the next version of Office with the Universal binary, expect Messrs
Dell and HP to slink quietly out the back door. But those machines
have yet to make their debut at Cuppertino...

Cheers

Winword does start TONS faster than 2004 on a Mac, EVEN if the "optimizing
font menu" DOESN'T show up.

Once it's running, it does ok, but some things are still pretty slow. I
think it is due to the large quantity of "legacy" and carbon-based code.
I'm hoping the next version will be faster, but then again, it will be the
new Office formats, so it may not.

Stay tuned and find out! ;-)

--

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

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Marc:

A Pentium-M in a Dell runs at up to twice the speed of the Core Duo on the
current MacIntels -- and on the MacIntel, you are first waiting for the
Rosetta emulator to load and create an environment before it can begin to
load Word.

You should also be aware that Word takes a LOT longer than it "appears" to
load on a PC. However, Office 97 and later on the PC includes a "pre-load"
mechanism that brings most of Office up when Windows boots. When you
"start" Word on the PC, effectively all you are doing is making an instance
of it "visible"

We're in very early days with the MacIntel (well, you are, I can't afford
one ...) You need to understand that nearly ALL of the software out there
for the Mac is currently designed to run on the old processor. The fact
that the MacIntel performs as well as it does with old software is nothing
short of amazing: every single instruction is "back to front" to it, and has
to be flipped for use on the Intel processor.

The next generation of software, the "Universal Binaries" will be at least
four times faster on your hardware. The next version of Office will be a
Universal Binary.

Cheers

Thanks for the information. I appreciate it.

I'm not sure if your PC system has a lot of background processes running or
a slower processor, but on my two-year-old crappy Dell Pentium M, Word takes
about one second to load, from the time I double-click, to the time I see a
blank document with a blinking cursor ready for typing. And no, I'm not
talking about maximizing it from the system tray, I'm talking about starting
the program fresh.

I'm just dismayed that it takes so long on the Mac. It's really annoying me
to wait while programs load, and I'm not sure if I should have switched.

--

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

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410