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California

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
Anyone know what laptop would be faster -- an INspiron 1000 dell laptop with 256mgs of ram or a 1.2 14" G4 ibook with 1.25gb of ram? What if ram were equal? What ARE Dell Inspirons, anyway?
 

mad jew

Moderator emeritus
Apr 3, 2004
32,191
9
Adelaide, Australia
Faster for what exactly? We may need more info before we can really say which is faster since the term "faster" is so broad. I'd say the iBook would run OSX better, which is really all that matters. :p


California said:
What ARE Dell Inspirons, anyway?


Dell Inspiron site, albeit without the Inspiron 1000. :)
 

California

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
mad jew said:
Faster for what exactly? We may need more info before we can really say which is faster since the term "faster" is so broad. I'd say the iBook would run OSX better, which is really all that matters. :p


Which is faster for Word and surfing net? Not games or anything...
 

mad jew

Moderator emeritus
Apr 3, 2004
32,191
9
Adelaide, Australia
Well, the Dell will be faster for both Office and surfing the net. These are two examples where Windows really does do better than OSX. Having said that, I find my 800MHz iBook G4 to be perfectly fast enough for both of these uses. The speed difference will only really be marginal since any new computer will do both of these tasks very fast. So really, it's the difference between really fast and really very fast.
 

California

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
Dang. Well, I wanted a slight speed bump in the 1.2 over the Inspiron 1000. Wonder if i drop a 7200rpm hard drive and full 1.25 gig of ram in it -- you think it would be faster than the Dell?
 

mad jew

Moderator emeritus
Apr 3, 2004
32,191
9
Adelaide, Australia
The difference between the two for Office and browsing is going to be negligible, maybe not even really noticeable. A faster hard drive will speed things up but you probably don't really need it - they are very expensive. There are other gains that you will get from an iBook over a Dell due entirely to OSX but unfortunately the only two major aspects where OSX is slower than Windows is in Office and browsing but I can't emphasise enough that the difference really is tiny.

Hell, with a bit of a placebo effect, you may even think the iBook is faster. :D
 

SummerBreeze

macrumors 6502a
Sep 11, 2005
593
0
Chicago, IL
The Dell might be faster, until it gets so bogged down with spyware that it runs like it has 32 mb of ram and loads up a viagra website everytime you mispell a URL. Although, with that big a difference in RAM, I don't know if the Dell would be faster at all. Maybe if it was running Linux...
 

California

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
Do you guys know if Word for Mac OX original is faster or slower than the newer Word for Mac 2004? I think i heard that the original Word is faster to use...
 

Mord

macrumors G4
Aug 24, 2003
10,091
23
UK
it's not about speed, internet speed is mostly dependent on your connection and word speed really does not matter unless you find and replace 100 times a day, the benefit with the ibook would be it would never bog down like wintel notebooks do.
 

bgd

macrumors regular
Aug 30, 2005
237
11
SG
XP will run on 256 ram, but not well. You would need to add more memory.
 

Chundles

macrumors G5
Jul 4, 2005
12,037
493
On my old POS 633MHz Celeron with 256 RAM, XP ran very well, stable, fast.

Mind you, Tiger runs rings around it.

No matter what you get today it will be more than fast enough for internet/word processing/watching movies etc so don't look at the GHz rating, look at what you can get feature-wise for your money and get the best you can afford.

An iBook is going to be a much more fulfilling purchase than a cheapo Dell.
 

mad jew

Moderator emeritus
Apr 3, 2004
32,191
9
Adelaide, Australia
Chundles said:
No matter what you get today it will be more than fast enough for internet/word processing/watching movies etc so don't look at the GHz rating, look at what you can get feature-wise for your money and get the best you can afford.

An iBook is going to be a much more fulfilling purchase than a cheapo Dell.


Listen to Chundles. :)

It's like comparing two F1 cars. One will be faster than the other but both are so fast at what you want them to do (the Office or browsing part) that it really is irrelevant. Okay, kinda bad analogy. Sorry. :eek:
 

Chundles

macrumors G5
Jul 4, 2005
12,037
493
mad jew said:
Listen to Chundles. :)

It's like comparing two F1 cars. One will be faster than the other but both are so fast at what you want them to do (the Office or browsing part) that it really is irrelevant. Okay, kinda bad analogy. Sorry. :eek:


Thanks mad jew.

Here's a good car analogy:

Which is faster? A lamborghini or a zonda?

Answer: Too fast for a normal person to take to the limit anyway so who cares.
 

bgd

macrumors regular
Aug 30, 2005
237
11
SG
Peter Griffin said:
I can't imagine running XP on 256. I use 512 and it's barely tolerable.

I did it for a couple of months when the laptop was replaced by insurance. It was a very 'painful' experience not to be repeated. Adding an extra gig turned it into a new machine.
 

Abstract

macrumors Penryn
Dec 27, 2002
24,837
850
Location Location Location
This thread is so......well......I won't say.

How fast can I use Word? I don't think Word will run faster than it already does. It will always work faster than I can work, no matter which system I use. They'll both be equal for surfing the net and typing documents in Word as far as I'm concerned. The difference is academic.
 

wordmunger

macrumors 603
Sep 3, 2003
5,124
3
North Carolina
Abstract said:
This thread is so......well......I won't say.

How fast can I use Word? I don't think Word will run faster than it already does. It will always work faster than I can work, no matter which system I use. They'll both be equal for surfing the net and typing documents in Word as far as I'm concerned. The difference is academic.
Actually, Word is slow as molasses. It can barely keep up with my typing. It's rather pathetic that after all these years, MS word on a 1.33 GHz machine is no faster than it was on my SE/30. In fact, Neooffice is faster (not to load, but once it's running), which indicates that it IS possible to make a usable word processor for Mac OS X.
 

ReanimationLP

macrumors 68030
Jan 8, 2005
2,782
33
On the moon.
wordmunger said:
Actually, Word is slow as molasses. It can barely keep up with my typing. It's rather pathetic that after all these years, MS word on a 1.33 GHz machine is no faster than it was on my SE/30. In fact, Neooffice is faster (not to load, but once it's running), which indicates that it IS possible to make a usable word processor for Mac OS X.

Thats probably because M$ bogged it down so you'd think Macs are slower than PCs. ;)
 

California

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
Word is slow for me on all my recent macs; that's why I asked that question -- and I wanted to get my partner to switch from Windoze to Mac permanently by falling in love with this 1.2 ghz iBook, off the Dell laptop. Thus the comparision.

I'm Mac proselytizing. And Word sometimes will just not react as fast as I'm writing; it is a bummer but still probably better than the Dell.
 

dmw007

macrumors G4
May 26, 2005
10,635
0
Working for MI-6
M$ Word runs fine on my 2.3GHz DP Power Mac G5 & I would imagine that it would run fine on the iBook G4 in question. In addition, I also use M$ word on a 1.6GHz iMac G5 w/512MB RAM and it seems to run just as smoothly (and I can type fairly fast) as on my Power Mac G5.

Go with the iBook over the Dell! :)
 

wordmunger

macrumors 603
Sep 3, 2003
5,124
3
North Carolina
Two suggestions for speeding up MS Word in Panther (can't speak for Tiger yet):

1. view page in Page Layout view, not "Normal"
2. Enable Quartz smoothing

These very counterintuitive changes make it at least semi-usable, and these days I do find myself using it more often than NeoOffice.
 
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