iBook G4 Slow Office Mac 2004 performance?

O

One Sick Puppy

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I'm about 2 months into owning my first iBook (my first Mac, too) and I'm finding Office Mac 2004 and Firefox are both comparitively much slower than on a PC.

The slowness is particularly noticable when scrolling through a document with the scroll bar. If I'm scrolling thru a document in Word or in Firefox, the scrolling is rather sluggish. If I scroll through the document fast (but within reason) the scroll bar will fall behind the mouse. If I do this repeatedly with the Activity Monitor open, I can see the CPU usage skyrocket. I still have ram free.

I've got my performance level set to Automatic, and I'm using wall power. This are no different if I set the energy saver to high performance.

Anyhoo... I don't imagine there is anything wrong with the computer. I'm more inclined to believe that Office 2004 and Firefox are just not very speedy programs on the Mac platform in comparison to a PC.

I tried the Office suite that comes with the iBook but I don't find it appealing. I also tried Open Office, but apparently I need X11 (whatever that is) and its only recommened for Unix-savvy users. I've tried Camino browser, but it crashed a couple times so I tossed it into the trash. I'll try Saffari, even though it reminds me of Netscape (bleh).
 
Safari is faster than FireFox on a reasonably speedy Mac, or at least in my unscientific tests it is. There are some things you can do to speed up FireFox though:
type about:config in the address bar. Make the following changes:
browser.turbo.enabled true
network.http.pipelining true
network.http.proxy.pipelining true (if you use a proxy)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 8
network.http.max-connections 30
network.http.max-connections-per-server 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy 8 (again, for proxy)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 8
nglayout.initialpaint.delay 100

That should speed things up some. But I still think Safari is faster.

As to Office, unfortunately it's just a poorly written program. Try to find the older Office v.X instead of 2004. It's faster and the differences are essentially nil.
 
Another thing to keep in mind id that the graphics rendering model on the Mac is much more complex than on a PC, it is slower because it does more. Things like the built in support for transparency and vector rather than just raster graphics have a degree of overhead involved. That shows up in cross platform applications like Firefox which does not use these extra features in general since they are not supported on windows or Linux.

If it is any conciliation windows is moving to the same style of rendering model with Longhorn so when it finally gets here your PC will behave similarly.

-Eric
 
I don't care so much about the web browsing but I'm amazed how slow Office 2004 runs - and the only thing I'm doing is word processing with Word. No images, either. I should just use TextEdit, come to think of it, since I don't use many advanced word features.

I'm trying to find Office V.x, but I'll try the office suite that came with the Mac, again, though from what I recal it felt way too different than word.

Thanks for the replies.
 
The slow speed of Office 2004 apps is not an original observation, glowing reports in the press to the contrary. I have seen this complaint from users with dual processor G5s. At one time Office was notorious for being slow and clunky on Macs, then Office 98 and Office v.X seemed to break that mold. But here we are again with Office 2004. Microsoft's previous excuse was they simply recompiled the code without any attempts to optimize it for either the Mac OS or the Mac hardware, but they had seen the error of their ways which showed up in the performance improvements of 98 and v.X. Wonder what their excuse will be for office 2004?

Remember too that on the PC, the Office developers have the huge advantage of working hand in glove with the OS developers. So if there is a processing bottleneck in Office they can fix it in Windows. They often use technology that is either not available or won't be revealed to third party developers until after the Microsoft products have shipped.

Even more interesting will be how real the touted performance enhancements of VPC 7 will turn out to be.
 
They probably place random bits of code all around the place just to slow things down if they go too fast. Something along the lines of

Code: 
time_t start = time(NULL);

//Perform whatever task 

time_t elapsed_time = time(NULL) - start;

if(elapsed_time < minimum_delay)
  sleep(5); //sleep for 5 seconds

//other code here
 
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