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NeoOffice trouble

J

jofima

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 12, 2008
40
0
I have been using NeoOffice for a couple of days now and it's driving me crazy. I must be doing something wrong but I can't figure out what.

There's a massive cursor lag. I can't write more than five to ten words, or even move the cursor five to ten times, before the program freezes for 1-2 seconds and a spinning wheel appears for another 2 seconds. After that, it resumes operations again -- for another five to ten seconds. Then it all starts again. If I happen to click on a menue, like "Edit", it draws half the menue and the lag starts.

I have ticked off automatic ("while typing") stuff, i.e. spellcheck. As far as I know, it shouldn't be doing anything else than pay attention to my typing. But obviously it does something. NeoOffice is also the only program running.

I document that took me some 30 minutes to compose in OS9 with Word 5.1, has taken me over three hours and I'm still not finished.

(I'm on a PPC G4 with 640mb ram.)
 
Damn, I was afraid of that.

But, is it the PPC or the RAM size? I've ordered two 512-sticks which should be arriving during next week. That should be bring me up to 1.2 Mb. Is that going to fix it, or would it still be sluggish?
 
jofima said:
Damn, I was afraid of that.

But, is it the PPC or the RAM size? I've ordered two 512-sticks which should be arriving during next week. That should be bring me up to 1.2 Mb. Is that going to fix it, or would it still be sluggish?
Click to expand...

I think it won't change that much. The PPC is a G4 or G?
Even the G5 is slow compared to Intel CPUs (what i mean is the Core series).
 
I used NeoOffice on my eMac (G4 with 512k RAM) until Mar 08, and it was usable, as fast as MS Office 2004.

I still have it, but spend most of my time on my MBP.
 
jofima said:
And you've experienced no cursor lags or general sluggishness when using it?
Click to expand...

It's been a while, but I tried it on my iBook G4 / 800 when I still had it, probably when it had 640MB and before I upgraded it to 1.125GB. My memory is also that it was quite usable (although I stuck with MS Office). There was some occasional cursor lagging, but nothing that rendered it unusable.

What version of OS X are you using? You might check your page-outs and see if there isn't anything you can do to make sure your RAM usage is minimized while using Neo -- and also don't multitask with it if you're getting unsatisfactory performance. If you're using Tiger, you may want to disable Dashboard and possibly Spotlight to speed the system up, and also make sure available disk space is plentiful.

Otherwise, honestly, I think finding an older version of Office (.X should be available for low cost, but 2004 is nicer) would be a better choice than iWork, since iWork is newer and really designed for more sophisticated processors than you have...
 
mkrishnan said:
It's been a while, but I tried it on my iBook G4 / 800 when I still had it, probably when it had 640MB and before I upgraded it to 1.125GB. My memory is also that it was quite usable (although I stuck with MS Office). There was some occasional cursor lagging, but nothing that rendered it unusable.

What version of OS X are you using? You might check your page-outs and see if there isn't anything you can do to make sure your RAM usage is minimized while using Neo -- and also don't multitask with it if you're getting unsatisfactory performance. If you're using Tiger, you may want to disable Dashboard and possibly Spotlight to speed the system up, and also make sure available disk space is plentiful.

Otherwise, honestly, I think finding an older version of Office (.X should be available for low cost, but 2004 is nicer) would be a better choice than iWork, since iWork is newer and really designed for more sophisticated processors than you have...
Click to expand...

How would I go about checking the amount of my page-outs?

I'm using Tiger (10.4.11). No other application is running while I use NeoOffice. (I don't use Dashboard.) It doesn't seem to make any difference if I re-boot and NeoOffice is the only app to be used, or if I use the Mac for a day, quit all programs and then start using NeoOffice.

Either way, I may have to go for iWork. It's supposed to function on a PPC (at least according to its specifications). MS Office is just too expensive for me, but I'll keep an eye out on eBay for the next couple of weeks.

(I still have to use Word 5.1 for most of my docs, which operates with almost super-natural speed on OS9 with 640 mb ram, even when working with 2Mb documents. It'll take me a long time to convert all my docs to a Tiger environment, so I have to go by it piecemeal.)
 
jofima said:
How would I go about checking the amount of my page-outs?
Click to expand...

You can use the System Monitor tool, in your utilities folder. Open it, and go to the memory section, and you will see the page-ins/outs by the pie graph at the bottom right. The Page-ins, which mean that a chunk of information is being brought in to RAM, are pretty irrelevant. The page-outs, which means that a chunk of memory is being swapped out to VM / swap space, indicate that you don't have enough memory for what you want to do. Basically, you should observe if they are occurring regularly while you're doing whatever you do on your laptop -- that is, if the number goes up. If the page-outs number is large (more than a few thousand, I guess), your Mac will typically run a lot faster if you use less RAM-intensive stuff or you add more RAM. If the page-outs are zero or extremely low and not moving much, that's an indicator that even if you added RAM, you would perceive no benefit.

To me, Tiger was fairly dicey on 640MB. Disabling Dashboard, which isn't the same as just not using it, actually did quite help for me, although the real difference was upgrading above 1GB.
 
jofima said:
I'm using Tiger (10.4.11). No other application is running while I use NeoOffice. (I don't use Dashboard.) It doesn't seem to make any difference if I re-boot and NeoOffice is the only app to be used, or if I use the Mac for a day, quit all programs and then start using NeoOffice.
Click to expand...
I have 10.4.11 on my eMac, that I mentioned above.

jofima said:
(I still have to use Word 5.1 for most of my docs, which operates with almost super-natural speed on OS9 with 640 mb ram, even when working with 2Mb documents. It'll take me a long time to convert all my docs to a Tiger environment, so I have to go by it piecemeal.)
Click to expand...

Wow that brings back memories! When I got my first Mac in late 1990, Word 5 was my main program.

How are you going to convert these older files?
 
exegete77 said:
Wow that brings back memories! When I got my first Mac in late 1990, Word 5 was my main program.

How are you going to convert these older files?
Click to expand...

It's time consuming but at least it's possible.

I save them as RTF on OS9. When I open them in NeoOffice, almost all formatting is preserved, even footnotes, headers & footers are there as they should. I have to re-adjust margins and line spacing a bit. Unfortunately graphics (illustrations, maps, etc.) are completely lost, but I can save those separately via some graphics utility and re-insert them later.

There is trouble with hidden text (like markers for index entries), which is no longer hidden. But it's possible to manage most of that via search/replace operations, although I don't remember now if NeoOffice can do search/replace. Either way, I'll have to dump NeoOffice because it's just too slow for me.
 
Can you write an AppleScript for OS 9 to automatically open and save as .rtf and then close?
 
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