Slow Word X
Jammer Six
It doesn't even keep up with my typing, and it's very annoying...
Thanks!
--
"We're going to rush the hijackers."
-Jeremy Glick, aboard United Airlines flight 93, September 11, 2001
Beth Rosengard
There have been a lot of posts about this topic lately. Here's one good
response from John McGhie and I suggest you do a search in this newsgroup on
the word "slow" for more.
Beth
- - - - - - - -
From John McGhie:
> This is a known problem. Basically, Word is waiting for the operating system.
> It's a tuning issue (or rather: it's thousands of them...)
>
> You will find that once Word gets the attention of the CPU, it actually moves
> along quite nicely. But as has been mentioned, OS X is actually Unix 1.0 for
> Mac, and it will take a while to get it tuned. Once OS X has been tuned,
> Microsoft can then tune Word to work with it. Currently, both Apple and
> Microsoft are concentrating on reliability. I am sure you would rather have
> it slow with no crashes than fast and crashing all the time.
>
> The reason Word seems to be so slow is because it is the most power-hungry of
> the Office applications. However, if you do cruel and unusual things to
> numbers in Excel, you will see that that has slowed down a bit too. You may
> be interested to notice that the "slowness" is actually "thread activation
> delays". Word (or anything else in OS X) often has to wait a second or so to
> get its thread running in OS X. Once it is running, you will find that Word's
> throughput in OS X is actually the equal of OS 9. In fact, for very long
> documents (more than a thousand pages...) Word X usually outperforms Word
> 2001. Also: that sexy Aqua user interface is unbelievably power hungry. But
> if it wasn't pretty, it wouldn't be a Mac, right?
>
> However, the pauses are frustrating, and everyone is working hard to get rid
> of them.
>
> There is a Service Release coming that may improve performance a bit. And
> make sure you stay on top of the Software Updates from Apple: as OS X gets
> quicker, so will Word.
>
> In the meantime, others have made suggestions about how to improve
> performance. Here is another list:
>
> 1) Work in Normal View as much as you can. This is a power-saving mode and
> makes things a lot quicker.
>
> 2) Turn OFF all the Automatic crap in Tools>Autocorrect. Most of them create
> more troubles than they cure anyway.
>
> 3) Give careful consideration to your Preferences>Save>AutoRecovery Save
> interval. The shorter the interval, the more frequently you will be
> interrupted: the longer the interval, the more data you stand to lose if you
> get a crash.
>
> 4) Turn Preferences>Save>"Allow Fast Saves" OFF and "Always make backup" ON.
> If you have done an upgrade install, these two may be set incorrectly. Fast
> Saves causes documents to corrupt on modern file systems. Always make Backup
> is essential: Word X crashes quite a bit. Note: If you have not saved the
> document, there will be no backup, so get in the habit of saving a document
> before you type anything in it, and then every time you stop to think.
>
> 5) Turn of Automatic Spelling and Grammar and Wordcount if you are not using
> them. Dynamic Word Count is rather hungry and particularly useless unless you
> are a lawyer filing court papers.
>
> None of these things will particularly affect the way you work. There are
> some more serious techniques we can recommend for long documents if you are
> interested.
- - - - - - - - - -
On 3/12/02 12:04 AM, in article 120320020004344832%jam...@invalid.oz.net,
Jammer Six
<bethro...@earthlink.net> wrote:
€ There have been a lot of posts about this topic lately. Here's one good
€ response from John McGhie and I suggest you do a search in this newsgroup on
€ the word "slow" for more.
Thanks, Beth!
Neill Massello
> Is there a way to speed up Word X?
>
> It doesn't even keep up with my typing, and it's very annoying...
I think the only thing you can do is turn off Live Word Count and Check
spelling/grammar as you type.