Office 2004 absolutely does not work on stock macbook, period.

[celebrian23]

My 2.0 mbp with stock ram doesn't take that long, but it still takes some time, so I wouldn't say that means something is wrong. I personally can't afford to bump my RAM. So I make 512mb work for me.

 

[Chrispy]

There is something wrong with it... plain and simple. You will see some lag due to ram but not that much.

 

[milo]

I simply don't have enough money to upgrade my RAM right away, because I have other concerns like eating.

That's too bad. Start saving up. You also may want to find some other app to do basic typing instead of the bloatware that is office.

consensus seems to be: Yes you'd benefit from more RAM, but there's something wrong beyond that. A stock macbook might beachball once in a while, but it should still be faster than an ibook, and absolutely should not be so slow as to be "useless."

There is something WRONG, not just a lack of RAM. Exchange it.

We had this exact discussion with the mini. Many people had the exact same experience, and it virtually always turned out to be not enough ram, with no other problems. My mini was the same way, terrible performance with 512 and excellent performance with more.

You could try and exchange it, but probably just a waste of time since odds are the machine isn't broken. Just get more ram.

Not to mention that apps running under rosetta won't necessarily be faster.

Ya, but seriously, I only use the thing for email, word processing or web, and I posted it in the hardware section because I had 2 gripes: 1)with Apple, because the computer is advertised as being able to do at least those three things (email, web, Word) and 'so much more' in its stock condition 'right out of the box...I'm a PC; I'm a Mac..' and all that rubbish - which the iBook did! With only 512MB. And 2) my second gripe was a software one with Microsoft because I looked on Mactopia before I switched to Macbook and it said that Office runs 'as good or better' on Rosetta, which isn't true unless you have an amount of RAM which, whatever you might think, is higher than most non-computer people are used to using for such basic functions.

I agree that it's more than most people would expect to need. But it's what people need. Get the ram.

Do you want to gripe, or do you want to solve your problem? Get the ram.

 

[SC68Cal]

That's very unusual.

Frankly, my Ti Book is one of the snappiest computers I've owned with a gig of ram in it and Tiger.

If anything, my computer should be the one beachballing like crazy, not yours.

 

[sebisworld]

If it's just Word, Powerpoint and Excel, try NeoOffice - it's based on OpenOffice, and is Universal Binary. Although OpenOffice tends to require more RAM than MS Office normally, you may be better off with NeoOffice. And you have nothing to lose trying it out. Admittedly, although I use OpenOffice on my Linux machine, I prefer Office even in Windows, but it's a good stopgap. Of course, if you need Entourage, that's not an option, but if another email application like ThunderBird would work with your email server, try that..

I'm sorry, but NeoOffice is by far the biggest piece of crap I have ever seen. It is sooooooo slow. I love OpenOffice and all and find it much better than MS Office in fact, but NeoOffice is just a pain.
I, however, also think that there is not one single office suite for the Mac that can stand up to MS Office or OpenOffice for Windows. The best text editor I have found so far - TextEdit. Word is slow, Pages is slow, NeoOffice is slow... on a 2 Ghz G5 with 1.5 Gigs of RAM.

I just wish I could code well - I'd be helping to port OpenOffice every second of my day.

 

[drewfasa]

He's right, NeoOffice is a slow piece of crap, and I know because I downloaded it for the exact reasons suggested: ie. because it is UB not PPC. However, to be fair, it is only an Alpha release at the moment. I like entourage because it integrates my tasks, projects, and calendars the best, and because it can retrieve my hotmail. I am currently trying to get Daniel's HTTPMail plugin to work for the mail.app but am not having any luck, and Thunderbird's integration with address book and calendar leave much to be desired (although it works okay with the webmail extension in retrieving hotmail.)

I definitely agree that I will have to buy more RAM, especially seeing as I really want to make this laptop work out - not many machines under £1000 deliver such a fast processor and up to 6 hours battery life. That is why I bought this laptop. Thus, I am currently selling 15 items on ebay.co.uk and am up to £76.20 total for all my items, which will get me one 1GB stick of Kingston value RAM off the net (although I might have to hitchhike to pick it up if I can't get enough for postage). Anybody want to buy a good-as-new hercules guitar stand and a lightly used Boss distortion pedal?

Also, I know that you are supposed to buy matching amounts, but the thing is I'm trying to work my way up to 2GB RAM (I'm hoping to get the second GB in September for my B-day from the folks) and I've read that 1279MB (or whatever it adds up to) is still better than 512MB by miles.

PS - has anybody tried Kingston value RAM in their macbook? I know kingston recommends their KTA MB667 RAM but it is about £10 more and seems to have the same specs. (a common phenomenon among things that are marketed as 'Apple' accessories - eg. 'ipod' headphone splitters etc.)

 

[solvs]

The best text editor I have found so far - TextEdit.

Ditto on that. I use it more than AppleWorks, Word, Pages, and Final Draft combined. I'd say try Pages, but you already have Office, and for what it costs you could get an extra stick of RAM. Don't know what else to say that hasn't already been said though. This is why I'm waiting to buy an Intel Mac.

 

[SC68Cal]

I think we have to remember that all the Office Suites out there have more features than you can shake a stick at (most are never even used anyway), while TextEdit is lean and mean.

Frankly, I'm tempted to say that if you are hell bent on speed, go use Nano.

 

[Miguel0019]

Hi, I'm not sure if anyone else is as frustrated as I am (or if anyone else actually has a stock macbook 1.8Ghz: it seems like everyone has already upgraded to 2gb RAM but me) but I feel that Microsoft, on their 'Mactopia' website, are not totally honest about the performance of office 2004 under Rosetta.

I bought office with my iBook G4, on which it ran just fine, but when I returned my faulty (warped) iBook, and replaced it with a new Macbook, I have found office to run painfully, awfully, and ridiculously slow. The worst is when it runs a notification. The first thing you notice is that whatever program you were using at the time stops responding. Then a blank icon appears in the dock. A minute or so later you hear a very distorted chime, and after about 3 more minutes the notification finally shows itself. Not only does Office run slower than molasses under Rosetta, but it eats up all your RAM so that none of your programs work properly!
Users should not need 1GB of RAM to run an office suite!

I must say that switching from an iBook G4 (which I returned because it was warped and didn't sit flat) to a stock Macbook 1.8GHz has been a catch 22.

On the one hand, I can now run windows and mac os on the same computer. I also have a webcam, a widescreen aspect ratio, a 20GB bigger hard drive, and a supposedly faster proccessor.

The downside is that I also have a computer that runs like a Windows XP computer with 64MB RAM and a 300MHz processor. I mean it is sloooooow.

I can sometimes wait for up to a minute to load my widgets (it used to be instantaneous on my iBook), and I now spend large amounts of time watching a spinning beachball while I wait to finish typing a sentence (in fact I just had to wait about 20 seconds for that reason before I started that last sentence.) Add this to the fact that the £100 pound MS Office 2004 (student license) is basically useless and you have a rather annoyed and jaded Macbook owner (only recently converted to mac too).

I was trying to show my Windows-based brother in law how great mac os X is and lost his attention and seriously embarrassed myself while waiting for my computer to get out of a stall and load my widgets.

I'm hoping that by buying a GB more RAM (I can only afford 1 stick right now) that things will get better, but the thing is that I am poor and wasn't planning on shelling out an extra £100 on a laptop that already cost me £750.

When selling the Macbook 1.8GHz, Apple should either warn buyers that they are buying the computer equivalent of a Ford KA (a car slower than a Geo Metro for you non-Euros who've never seen the heinous contraption that is the KA), or else raise the price and put in what appears to be the minimum required about of RAM (+1GB)

You need to give it a little bit of time....for the tel mac to work with every sofware available.

 

[dextertangocci]

Stupid microsoft. Messed up your MB. Idiots