Office 2004 & RAM: How Much (Minimum)?

[pimentoLoaf]

Am getting an iBook Monday and am thinking 768mb RAM is sufficient to have Office 2004 running with all four programs (and iWork) in memory simultaneously.

Anyone with this combination, please weigh in.

 

[wordmunger]

Am getting an iBook Monday and am thinking 768mb RAM is sufficient to have Office 2004 running with all four programs (and iWork) in memory simultaneously.

Anyone with this combination, please weigh in.

I have an iBook with 768 MB of RAM and just opened most of those programs, plus photoshop, with no difficulty. I suppose it depends on how much you hammer the particular apps (e.g. 20,000 row Excel spreadsheet, 300 page MS word file), but I think you'll probably be fine.

 

[macbaseball]

IMO, you should buy a gig of RAM. 768 is right on the border, especially with using Pages. I would just get a gig, and not have to deal with the hassle of getting rid of the 512 chip in the future, if you want to upgrade. With the prices of 1 GB chips these days, I think it's the best buy.

 

[mkrishnan]

Being realistic, if you actually open up those six programs at the same time on 768mb of memory, and actually start *doing* things in them while frequently switching between all the given pairs of two within the six programs, you are going to get memory caching. But unless you're doing this specifically to test your computer, in real life, the memory caching should be fairly minimal. What are you really doing that needs six apps at once to do it, and especially that particular set of six apps?

FWIW, when I want to use 1-2 Office 04 apps in 640MB of memory, I usually don't shut down what I already have running (which is usually Safari, Mail, Address Book, iTunes, iCal, and Terminal).

 

[pimentoLoaf]

That's great WM. Office 2001 was working with a bunch of apps (Photoshop Elements, PageMaker, StickyBrain) on my now antique 640mb iceBook under os9 quite well -- nice to hear that a few megs more will work fine under osX.

 

[MisterMe]

That's great WM. Office 2001 was working with a bunch of apps (Photoshop Elements, PageMaker, StickyBrain) on my now antique 640mb iceBook under os9 quite well -- nice to hear that a few megs more will work fine under osX.

You simply cannot compare the behavior of MacOS X apps to MacOS 9 apps. MacOS 9 apps may perform miserably on the same computer that runs MacOS X apps well. Gotta love preemptive multitasking.