Leopard issues with Office and Adobe Suite and other apps

[stephgreene]

My coworker inherited a white MacBook 2Ghz with 1GB Ram that was running Tiger. We cleared out the whole hard drive to eliminate the previous user's data, installed Windows XP using bootcamp on one partition and upgraded on the other partition to Leopard (and did all the appropriate software updates to 10.5.5, fixed all the disk permissions with DiskWarrior and have all the other programs up to date). We installed Office '04, Adobe CS3, and a bunch of other apps that are specific to our work. I basically have the same setup on my computer (with the exception of 2GB Ram) - I have a partition with with windows, I'm running Office and CS3 with Leopard and my computer runs flawlessly. Her computer is a different story - hers crashes constantly, Office is unreliable and crashes with out any predictable pattern (especially when running powerpoint- that program just won't stay open), other apps quit all the time. Basically her computer is unusable. She wants to throw it off the roof, but I'm convinced that this can be fixed. I've tried the basic fixes that usually work (DiskWarrior, fixing disk permissions, software updates, etc). What should we do?

[fryke]

Sounds like a clean install would *definitely* help this computer. Simply clean install Leopard on the computer (i.e. get rid of Tiger's leftovers, all apps, all data etc.), install Office (2008 would run better, but 2004 is fine) and Adobe CS3. Forget about using DiskWarrior or any other tools for now. A clean install reformats the harddrive, anyway.Then update the system and apps, of course, 'til they're up-to-date.