Office 2004/Safari/Tiger on the Mini

G

GanChan

macrumors 6502a
Hi folks, new guy here, so pardon my flurry of questions. I just bought a Mac Mini to replace my old (Rev A! 8 years of daily use!) iMac after a power surge killed it. I will be getting Office 2004 for cheap at the university where I work. My question is, will the install of Office overwrite the Office trial-demo folder that shipped with Panther, or do I need to trash the demo files before installation, etc?

Second question: Safari seems to be dragging its butt a little, not on all websites but many of them. Is Safari known for this (in which case I should switch to a different browser), or is it the result of only having 256 RAM?

And finally, should I wait until I have more RAM before upgrading to Tiger?

Thanks :)
 
You should trash the Demo... it takes all of 1 second anyway! :) And Safari running slow could be due to RAM. People here will tell you "512 MB is the minimum for OS X" and I tend to agree. Performance at 256 really suffers.
 
256 is fine unless you plan to have a lot of apps open. i ran 256 for about 4 months before upgrading to 768. I really didn't notice any big differences until i had more than like 4 or 5 apps open at once. It was much snappier then.

EDIT: this was on a 15" revision C powerbook.
 
GanChan said:
Hi folks, new guy here, so pardon my flurry of questions. I just bought a Mac Mini to replace my old (Rev A! 8 years of daily use!) iMac after a power surge killed it. I will be getting Office 2004 for cheap at the university where I work. My question is, will the install of Office overwrite the Office trial-demo folder that shipped with Panther, or do I need to trash the demo files before installation, etc?

Second question: Safari seems to be dragging its butt a little, not on all websites but many of them. Is Safari known for this (in which case I should switch to a different browser), or is it the result of only having 256 RAM?

And finally, should I wait until I have more RAM before upgrading to Tiger?

Thanks :)
Click to expand...

1. I'm not sure whether the Office demo folder gets overwritten, I would guess not

2. Safari is not a bad performer, but with 256Mb RAM most things will seem slowish

3. I would get more RAM as a priority, and then upgrade to Tiger. 512Mb is OK but 1Gb would be best if you are going to use Office. Word and Powerpoint feel slow at the best of times, so don't expect lightning performance from these apps even with 1Gb. Apple memory is way expensive, but there are plenty of suppliers like Crucial who have a good reputation
 
On Office -- there were issues with Office.X if you *ran* the trial version and then tried to install Office.X over it without uninstalling (the problems occurred even if one trashed the trial folder, but did not run the uninstaller, because they arose from files in the library folder and not in the apps folder). I don't think this issue exists with 2004, but to be on the safe side, look in the Office trial folder for an uninstaller utility -- there should be one in there, and it should be easy to find. Just run it before you install 2004.

On Safari -- there are certain things that seem to particularly affect Safari. It doesn't seem to handle pages with a large number of animated GIFs very well. It also has slow-downs for some kinds of javascripting. But both of these are relatively rare issues -- if you have a problem on many sites, then it is probably not due to these kinds of issues. When Safari is dragging, do you see a beach-ball (the mouse cursor changes to a beach-ball-like image)? If you do not see a beach-ball, then it is not a memory issue. If you do see one, it may or may not be a memory issue (having a lot of tabs open will cause beach-balls in some cases even when plenty of memory is available, as will some of the jscript issues). But I would recommend getting Firefox or Camino, if nothing else, as a backup.... You might as well give them a try. Some people like them better than Safari. I personally go back and forth. I used Firefox over Safari for most of my time on Panther, but have mostly used Safari since I got Tiger. These browsers will respond to the peculiar slow-down issues of Safari differently, because they use a different engine. Also, finally, Opera is a relatively low resource browser, so if you really want a better experience on limited RAM, Opera may be worth trying. Some people love it, but I personally don't care for it.... Also it isn't free.

Good luck, and hope you enjoy your Mini! :)
 
It won't let me throw it away!

The Office 2004 "test drive" folder has no uninstall utility in it, just the apps. I tried trashing it, but it won't let me empty the trash -- it keeps saying that such-and-such file (one after the other!) is "in use." But they AREN'T in use; I just now booted up the computer!

What's going on? Is this "test drive" here to stay? :mad:
 
When you get your Office 2004 CD run the uninstaller from it before you actually install Office, this uninstaller will seek out the Test Drive version and remove it.
 
I'm good now. It was a little weird at first, because I was expecting the installer to seek out older versions before doing the installation, not after. But it did the job.
 
GanChan said:
I'm good now. It was a little weird at first, because I was expecting the installer to seek out older versions before doing the installation, not after. But it did the job.
Click to expand...
The uninstaller allows you to choose which Office installation to uninstall.
 
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