Hi Nate:
Yeah, well... I think you are subjecting that poor computer to cruel and
unusual punishment
Please let us accept a little reality here: It's not "Windows" that's
quicker (although it is a little) it's the "computer".
None of Apple's (or Intel's...) waffle gets away from the fact that we are
often comparing data travelling on a 133 or 150 MHz line with data
travelling on a 3,200 MHz line. Of course, a dual 2 GHz G5 will improve
your mileage somewhat. If you get one, can you send me one too, please?
The speed of the CPU is practically irrelevant (which is why people are so
fond of quoting it...) What determines how quickly "Word" does things is
the speed of the motherboard and the speed of the disk. The more complex
the document, the more you will see this effect.
We could start the thread from hell very easily at this juncture, so let me
see if I can hold it down to a dull roar:
1) Word 2004 changed to Apple's ATSUI text rendering system from Apple's
QuickDraw mechanism. This is the main reason Word 2004 seems a little
slower, particularly when scrolling, than Word X. It is: about 20 per cent
slower if there's a lot of text on the screen.
2) ATSUI is about 20 per cent slower than QuickDraw. It's also quite a bit
slower than the equivalent Windows mechanism, but give them a chance: the
Windows mechanism is in its sixth generation and has been seriously tuned
for speed. Apple will get there, but this is not "coding 101" - this stuff
is difficult
3) The best you can get on Apple at the moment is 1 GHz of front-side bus.
Word can use only one processor, and it's only 32-bits wide, so while a
second processor can mean Word gets interrupted less often by the system, it
won't actually make a lot of difference to how quickly Word does things.
The fastest Pentiums will go a little quicker than this (not much!!).
4) Windows XP is also in its sixth generation. It is completely tuned and
optimised for the environment it finds itself in. OS X is still in this
process: that's why the updates are coming so regularly. Again, give them
time.
5) At home, I currently have Word 2003 on Windows XP on a 256 MB Pentium
1500 and Word 2004 on OS 10.3.4 on a 1.2 GHz G4 with 256 MB of memory. The
performance of the two is about line-ball. The laptop is a little slower
when things start happening too or from the disk because laptops have a slow
system bus and slow disks, whereas the PC blew a hard disk recently and I
put a quick one in it. Both would go a lot better if I had the funds to
shovel them full of memory
Now: How to respond to this?
1) The most obvious improvement you can make to Word is to add memory to
the system. 1 GB of memory is a nice round number. For normal documents, I
find that Word 2004's performance on a 1 GHz processor in 256 MB of memory
is very acceptable. For the kind of documents *I* do, 512 would be better
and 1 GB is very handy as your documents climb above 500 pages each.
2) The next most obvious improvement you can make is a fast disk. Word
does not "stream" data onto the disk, it makes literally thousands of small
random accesses. A disk with high rotational speed and a very short seek
time will improve your performance, as will a disk with a large cache. Just
remember that the faster the disk spins, the louder and hotter it will get,
and the sooner it will fail. Don't be tempted to put such a disk in an
iMac, it may overheat and cook the system.
3) Now decide if you are going to do long complex documents. If you are,
take the time to learn the techniques the pros use, such as external
graphics and inline with text objects and cleaning up documents. Hang
around here and I will be happy to describe each of these in detail.
Embedding graphics is very convenient, but it imposes quite a heavy speed
penalty.
4) If you are going to make a living in long and complex documents, then
the time you will save with that Dual 2 GHz G-5 with 2 GB of memory and a
RAID-5 15,000 RPM SCSI 320 array will pay for it in a year or two. For the
rest of us, patience is not only a virtue, it's a great cost-saver.
5) When heaving complex documents around in Word, it pays to Quit, not just
minimise, other applications. Each reduction in the number of interruptions
other applications make to tell the system they don't have anything to do
will speed up the apparent responsiveness of Word a lot. Windows Word
doesn't actually go much faster than Mac Word, but Windows is very highly
developed to make it "appear" faster by favouring the user's actions over
getting work done in the background
Each application you quit frees up
a chunk of memory Word can grab.
Hope this helps
I have a Word document that was partly done on a PC with embedded high
resolution graphics (not sure what type) which, sad to say, the PC
appears to do better than the Mac in Word. In Word X it was a bit slow
as I scrolled through the document the first time and hit these
graphics, but not too bad. With Word 2004 it is *much* worse -
spinning beachball for probably 15 seconds or more, and more beachballs
after that. Neither version handles hyperlinks to files on the network
well - you could go get dinner in the time it takes to open the file.
On the PC it is almost instantaneous.
Nate
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John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410
