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Desperate for some advice seeks expert!

U

umdjb

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 27, 2006
220
0
Washington D.C.
Hey everyone,

Sadly, I parted with my dear G4 12' PB for in order to get some cash and save up for a new MacBook with an Intel chip back in the Summer of '06 (I owned it for a year). I have been patiently waiting for the Intel product line on Macs to work out all the hiccups with hopes of buying one in the near future. I have my budget and am looking to make my purchase post-MWSF. However, I am undecided which route to choose. I truly miss my PB and long for one of the new Macs. My main use for a computer is email, word, excel, web-browsing, and music. Games, video/photo editing, DVD burning are all out of the question. Ideally, the MB is the right choice for me.

However, visiting an Apple store and testing out the MBs I noticed that MS Office runs extremely slow. Why is this so. Does anyone else experience problems? The model I tested had about a 1GB of Ram. Do you think a 2GB upgrade will improve performance for MS Office? Also, would you suggest taking the lower end MB with 2MB L2 Cache, or the 4MB L2 cache? I really dont know the difference, so if anyone can enlighten me I would be greatly appreciated. I already own a Dell PC, and just hope to use the Mac for basic productivity and portability. I also get the student discount.

What would you DO!?
 
The original Power PC version of MS Office does drag a bit on the Intels
unless you configure your machine with 2 GB RAM, but it's no where near
a true indicator since MS Office 2007 is just around the corner and will be universal binary, so it will be running roughly 80% faster than the current
MS Office 2004.

Unfortunately, I have not heard about upgrade pricing yet for people who buy
MS Office 2004 now before 2007 is released.
 
umdjb said:
However, visiting an Apple store and testing out the MBs I noticed that MS Office runs extremely slow. Why is this so.
Click to expand...

Because MacBooks are using Intel processors, Powerbooks had PPC processors, and Microsoft Office was written for PPC processors. Applications that are written for the PPC processors can only run on modern Intel-based Macs using a program called Rosetta.

There's a SIGNIFICANT performance hit to any application running in Rosetta. Not only in terms of processing power, but also in terms of RAM.

Microsoft will soon release new versions of Microsoft Office that will run at native speeds on the new Intel-based Macs, but for now you would have to live with that speed, more or less.

But for what it's worth, I didn't have any complaints about MS Office's speed on my iMac Core Duo. You might be talking about some different problem, in which case I apologize.
 
So you are saying that Microsoft will release a version of Office 2007 that will run on OSX? If I know that is the case I will gladly wait for it to come out to buy it. I currently have Office 2004 from my old PB G4.

Also could you elaborate on the difference between the 1.83C2D with 2MB of L2 Cache and the 2.0 C2D with 4MB of L2 Cache?

Thanks!
 
umdjb said:
So you are saying that Microsoft will release a version of Office 2007 that will run on OSX? If I know that is the case I will gladly wait for it to come out to buy it. I currently have Office 2004 from my old PB G4.

Also could you elaborate on the difference between the 1.83C2D with 2MB of L2 Cache and the 2.0 C2D with 4MB of L2 Cache?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

To clarify: Office already exists for OS X. What the previous posters meant was that it was written for the PPC architecture (like your PowerBook). It has not yet been written for the Intel architecture (the MacBook and MacBook Pro). It is currently running under emulation via Rosetta (an app that converts PPC to Intel). This emulation makes it run slower. However, Microsoft does plan to release an intel friendly version.
 
bearbo said:
80%, eh? i wonder where you got the data:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Someone did a test between the native performance of Office 2003 under Windows XP and Office 2004 under OSX and the same operation took 3 seconds in Windows XP (native) and 1 minutes 57 seconds on OSX.

Even factoring into account the OSX bloat and Rosetta's suckiness that difference in speed speaks loads.
 
office runs quite snappy on my cd mbp, grant it i'm running office v.x :cool:
edit: all oct-dec i used office in school with 1gb of ram. Over christmas i got an upgrade to 2gb. I just launched word and all i can say is wow. I've never seen it launch so fast and it while it was never a problem before it got bogged down quite easily. The extra gb absolutely helped a lot for rosetta apps.
 
I immediately swapped out the stock RAM (2x512) with (2x1GB) so I can't tell you if 1GB + MS Office is slow but I can tell you that with 2GB its blazing fast. I wonder how fast 3GB is with the MBP 2.33Ghz..:cool:
 
umdjb said:
What is Office V.X?

Can anyone please explain what 2MB of L2 Cache is?
Click to expand...

L2 cache is memory that is on the processor. It saves the most often used commands there so the processor can have extremely fast access to them. as with most thing tech wise more of this is better, how much I don't know.

Office v.x is the version of office that came out before office 2004. '01 or '02 i think.

phungy said:
I immediately swapped out the stock RAM (2x512) with (2x1GB) so I can't tell you if 1GB + MS Office is slow but I can tell you that with 2GB its blazing fast. I wonder how fast 3GB is with the MBP 2.33Ghz..:cool:
Click to expand...

no better, running office i get no page outs from the hard disk so more memory wouldn't solve anything. But would give you nice braggin rights. but remember im running office from 5 or 6 years ago, wow, back then 512 was uber huge.
 
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