iBook performance problems -- office related?

[zimv20]

i've got a friend w/ an iBook that is really sluggish.

- 600 MHz
- 256 meg RAM
- 10.2.2
- HD about 3/4 full
- doesn't run classic emulator

his xbench score was 44. my 400 MHz g3 powerbook running jaguar (xbench score 30) seems much faster.

he does run office for osx. anecdotal evidence among my ibook friends (2 w/o office, 2 with), shows that those who have office installed complain loudly about overall performance, those who don't (they use appleworks) are quite happy w/ their machines. overall specs are similar.

anyone w/ an ibook here who can add to that anecdotal evidence?

anyone w/ any other suggestions?

i've suggested:
1. changing video to thousands of colors
2. defragging
3. doing a clean install of osx

those changes are in progress. but i've used the machine when the HD was about half full and it was pretty sluggish.

btw -- i just realized that the two w/o complaints have turned on user accounts and must log in. those w/ complaints boot straight to the desktop. i'm not claiming that'll make a difference, but it's another pattern.

 

[alex_ant]

I don't think auto login has anything to do with it... probably not color depth, either.

Office X is a "demanding" office suite. The cursor in Word lags on my 550MHz G4 w/ 256MB of RAM. I went back to AppleWorks. I doubt adding RAM would help much in this case if all your friends are doing is using Office, but it couldn't hurt, and 256MB of laptop memory is only about $40 these days. Defragging couldn't hurt, and neither could clearing some space on the hard drive, but I doubt those would do much good either.

Try this

 

[zimv20]

yeah, i still run word 98 via classic emulator on jaguar, and it's not a performance hit (on my g3 pbook). how sad that osx word is so intensive.

i've passed on the anti-aliasing hint -- thank you.

it's not just Office that's a drag -- it's the whole machine. what i was getting at is: is it possible that just having Office installed causes a performance hit?

IE is also slow -- i told him to try chimera.

 

[alex_ant]

I don't see how Office could have an effect on the performance of the entire system...

The thing is, I think different people have different ideas of what "fast" means. I came to the Mac from a PC running Linux (also with a 550MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM) and I thought OS X 10.1 was just abysmally slow. I felt I had been deceived by everyone who said "it flies on my 333MHz iMac!" (Note: Never trust anyone with "mac" in their nickname to provide you with an accurate measure of performance.)

10.2 has improved the situation a little bit, but I guess I'm just more used to it now, and I'm willing to accept the speed hit in trade for all the other nice things the Mac offers me. But anyway, if your friends think OS X feels slow, then they're probably right - it does feel slow. Especially on a G3. There's not much that can be done about that - it's just how OS X is.

 

[sparkleytone]

yes the g3 and OS X are definitely not a match made in heaven. i mean, my iBook definitely runs OS X Jaguar rather nicely, but I got a chance this weekend to play with a PowerBook 400 that just smoked it in general use, with less RAM. This is a machine that has a 200MHz less MHz rating and 256MB less RAM than my iBook. I could definitely feel the power of the G4. Or maybe that was the heat it generated

IMHO OS X is the OS we have all been waiting for, but its going to take yet another generation or so to begin to see its real potential. Apple has done alot of extremely progressive things under the hood, especially with the graphics layer. The compositing is more advanced than any other OS out there, and Apple is not backing off, rather its pushing forward with technologies like QE.

 

[LimeiBook86]

My experiences with Word...

I have Mac OS X 10.1.5 ( I REALLY WANT JAGUAR BUT HAVE NO CASH !!!) Anyway I installed the Microsoft Office v.X demo on my iBook, it ran so slow that I took it off instantly! It was a waste of my Hard Drive space!!! I have a 466mhz FireWire Special Edition iBook with a 10GB Hard Drive and 320mb RAM, of course my iBook seems slugish compared to your "newer" iBooks!!

...

I'm just jelous becuase yours are better, but I love my Key Lime iBook

 

[zimv20]

but it IS sluggish

the points about "fast" being relative are well taken. but i have used his machine (600 MHz ibook) and it did seem slow, compared to my 400 MHz g3 pbook.

that was when he had 10.1. now w/ jaguar, he says it's slower.

some of his data points:

1. when using Internet Connect and pressing Connect, it might take 30 seconds to produce a dial tone

2. when typing in Mail or Word, the display stops updating and he may type in a whole paragraph before it displays the whole chunk

3. when in Finder, it may take 20 seconds to move the scroll bar (i.e. click to move scrollbar to show next group of items)

this is not my experience w/ my slower g3 powerbook.

 

[iapple]

Speed with jaguar

I did the "overwrite" install of Jaguar over OS X 10.1.5, and it did the same on my PowerBook G4 667MHz, 512MB ram. It was EXTREMELY sluggish, and it was about the speed of my 500 MHz G3 iBook running 10.1.

I did a "clean" install of Jaguar next, and re-formatted my harddrive, and WOW! The speed was no comparison! Word, Excel, Powerpoint, all ran smoothly, and fast! (Entourage is still VERY sluggish, so I'm using Mail/iCal instead)

Try doing a clean install, re-formatting the hd. Even defraggin it might help. If you have a relatively spacious HD, you might want to have partitions, and have all your Audio/Video stuff on one, and re-format it ever so often to avoid fragmentation.

Good luck! jaguar is definitely NOT slow, even on a G3 iBook, if you do a clean install. IT's definitely NOT slower than 10.1!

 

[Microsoft_Windows_Hater]

I was looking in top today to find out why my computer was running so slow (iBook 500, 576mb or ram, 10gb HD) and found an alarming fact. Microsoft Office was using 22%+ of my cpu cycles and about 170mb or ram.

I think that might be your answer. Easy answer, stop the application. The application was hidden at that time.

Hope that helps,

Mat

 

[Falleron]

zimv20, you mention in your original post that you are using 10.2.2. Are you using a Beta? If so, this could be the cause of your slowdowns.

 

[zimv20]

Originally posted by Falleron
zimv20, you mention in your original post that you are using 10.2.2. Are you using a Beta? If so, this could be the cause of your slowdowns.

not a beta. that's a released version.

EDIT:

whoops! you're right. my friend has 10.2.1.
my bad.

 

[zimv20]

Re: Speed with jaguar

Originally posted by iapple

I did a "clean" install of Jaguar next, and re-formatted my harddrive, and WOW! The speed was no comparison! Word, Excel, Powerpoint, all ran smoothly, and fast! (Entourage is still VERY sluggish, so I'm using Mail/iCal instead)

good to know, thanks. i'll pass that along.

 

[zimv20]

Originally posted by Microsoft_Windows_Hater
Microsoft Office was using 22%+ of my cpu cycles and about 170mb or ram.

I think that might be your answer. Easy answer, stop the application. The application was hidden at that time.

MS writes such piggy s/w.

are you saying that you weren't even running an office app at the time? had you been running one? or does it launch itself as a service?

good info. thank you.