I have 32gb free on my HD, any ideas why everything always moves so slow with Office or anything other than JUST safari or itunes?
Thanks!
jack
Thanks!
jack
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Word + Safari + iTunes on MacMini = SLOW
- Thread starter JackArc
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
The speed at which your mac mini runs has nothing to do with how much space you have. I would guess that you have 512MB of RAM which is a bit on the low side for a mac. I would highly recommend you have atleast 1GB of RAM or more if you can afforde it.
If you are running an intel mac office will run a lot slower since its not ment to run on an intel mac and is doing so via apples translator (rosseta).
I agree that RAM is probably needed. To make sure this is the case, restart you Mac and then tell us how many page ins and page outs you have after an hour of normal usage. These figures can be found in Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder. 
More RAM, don't ya' know?
I've used both PPC and Intel minis, both seem mind-numbingly slow until you feed the RAM hole.
IN FACT, my core solo is running iTunes, Limewire, Trasmission, MSN, Skype, Safari, Mail, PowerPoint, Word, another mail application, Remote Desktop, and Parallels right now. I didn't relize how many applications I was running......
I've used both PPC and Intel minis, both seem mind-numbingly slow until you feed the RAM hole
IN FACT, my core solo is running iTunes, Limewire, Trasmission, MSN, Skype, Safari, Mail, PowerPoint, Word, another mail application, Remote Desktop, and Parallels right now. I didn't relize how many applications I was running......
If office 2004 is particularly slow, take a look at this tip from Macworld:
Fix Fonts Office maintains its own font cache, which can cause problems if damaged. To delete this cache, quit all Office 2004 applications and then drag the file /your user folder/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (11) to the Trash.
It made my GF's mac mini a lot more responsive when using office.
Also, if you have Acrobat, you should spotlight search for pdfmaker.dot and the other Acrobat plugins for office (pdfmaker.*), and delete them, because they slow down office too.
Source
Fix Fonts Office maintains its own font cache, which can cause problems if damaged. To delete this cache, quit all Office 2004 applications and then drag the file /your user folder/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (11) to the Trash.
It made my GF's mac mini a lot more responsive when using office.
Also, if you have Acrobat, you should spotlight search for pdfmaker.dot and the other Acrobat plugins for office (pdfmaker.*), and delete them, because they slow down office too.
Source
The space on your hard drive is not as important as RAM. Are you running an Intel-based Mac mini or is it using a PowerPC processor?
MS Office, being a PowerPC application, on an Intel processor has to be emulated and that requires a lot of RAM to make it work smoothly.
On a PowerPC-based machine, 512 MB should be considered minimum and on an Intel-based machine running PowerPC applications, the maximum RAM possible should be employed.