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Microsoft office cause lagging?

A

ajack

macrumors member
Original poster
May 31, 2010
43
0
I'm using MBA mid 2009 (1.86GHz core2duo, 2GBs RAM) and everything seems fine with using Chrome open few tabs, facebook and iTunes. But it happens to lag when I tried to use Word, Excel, and the thing is my word file is almost nothing but text.

I'm using SMC fan control and I notice that the temperature goes up 60-65 C when using Microsoft Office. Moreover, my MBA won't speed up when I quit MS word and it took me about 5-10mins for everything to come back to normal.

So, should I switch to iWork?
 
I've been noticing the same thing, but I correlate it to iTunes, specifically when we I have MS Office and iTunes at the same time. I cannot think of a technical explanation...
 
So, what about the lagging after I force quit MS office? Does it need few minutes to free RAM?
 
MS Office reportedly has issues with memory management. My copy of office can lag on my imac with 8gb ram, what more your mba? :(
 
Abazigal said:
MS Office reportedly has issues with memory management. My copy of office can lag on my imac with 8gb ram, what more your mba? :(
Click to expand...

What the...

I just don't like iWork UI, and, MS Office is somehow easier for me to work with many Windows-users
 
ajack said:
What the...

I just don't like iWork UI, and, MS Office is somehow easier for me to work with many Windows-users
Click to expand...

No choice then, just suck it up. :(

Iwork should run more smoothly, it supposedly being designed with the OSX in mind, but I personally have had little experience with it outside of the 30 day trial. Keynote's templates impressed me tremendously though, but pages was much less exciting, as the layout reminded me of wordpad. :eek:
 
Never noticed any lag with Office 11 on my 2011 MBA (4GB ram). Just for what it's worth.

I would think that iWork would have far less overhead than MS Office, so if you don't need Office for particular compatibility reasons it'd be worth giving it a shot.
 
deeddawg said:
never noticed any lag with office 11 on my 2011 mba (4gb ram). Just for what it's worth.

I would think that iwork would have far less overhead than ms office, so if you don't need office for particular compatibility reasons it'd be worth giving it a shot.
Click to expand...

+1
 
ajack said:
I'm using MBA mid 2009 (1.86GHz core2duo, 2GBs RAM) and everything seems fine with using Chrome open few tabs, facebook and iTunes. But it happens to lag when I tried to use Word, Excel, and the thing is my word file is almost nothing but text.

I'm using SMC fan control and I notice that the temperature goes up 60-65 C when using Microsoft Office. Moreover, my MBA won't speed up when I quit MS word and it took me about 5-10mins for everything to come back to normal.

So, should I switch to iWork?
Click to expand...

Your computer is pretty slow and you have very little RAM so I would be surprised if it didn't lag with any applications.
 
theSeb said:
Your computer is pretty slow and you have very little RAM so I would be surprised if it didn't lag with any applications.
Click to expand...

I totally agree with you that MBA mid 2009 is really slow.

But, how can people used MBA mid 2009 2.5 years ago? MS Office 2008 is much worse than 2011, MAC OSX Snow Leopard is not making MBA run faster and they still use same apps: web browser (Safari, Chrome, FF...), iTunes, Adobe, Office...

And, CPU, GPU could not run slowlier overtime!
 
ajack said:
I totally agree with you that MBA mid 2009 is really slow.

But, how can people used MBA mid 2009 2.5 years ago? MS Office 2008 is much worse than 2011, MAC OSX Snow Leopard is not making MBA run faster and they still use same apps: web browser (Safari, Chrome, FF...), iTunes, Adobe, Office...

And, CPU, GPU could not run slowlier overtime!
Click to expand...

Your CPU and GPU will not slow down over time. What will happen though is your whole system could slow down over time due to various factors and most of these are to do with your hard drive. I would look to do a fresh install and see how things go from there.
 
theSeb said:
Your CPU and GPU will not slow down over time. What will happen though is your whole system could slow down over time due to various factors and most of these are to do with your hard drive. I would look to do a fresh install and see how things go from there.
Click to expand...

Actually, I did fresh install but nothing changed...
 
ajack said:
Actually, I did fresh install but nothing changed...
Click to expand...

The apps you've mentioned also have had upgrades in the mean time, including Snow Leopard. Sometimes an upgrades makes things look different or adds functionality at the expense of performance. Developers are happy to add new features that current hardware can handle without always considering the impacts to old hardware. Simply put, the expense of optimising software for old hardware does not make much business sense, when the hardware keeps getting faster (Moore's Law)

For example, my iPhone 4 used to run Safari beautifully until iOS 5 came along. Now it stutters when scrolling and inputting text on a forum like this.

There is no physical reason why your CPU and GPU performance would degenerate over time. I don't use it much these days, but my 2009 C2D MBP still runs everything well so I honestly cannot explain why you are seeing more lag than usual. It all depends on your use cases. For me the 2009 was "laggy" the moment I bought it so I upgraded the RAM to 8 GB. As I said before, considering the specifications of your computer and especially the 2 GB of RAM, I cannot see how it could have ever felt like a smooth and satisfying experience.
 
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