Word 2008 really, really slow

[Stephe]

Apologies - I've posted this query in office.mac as well, but haven't
received a reply, so am posting here.

I've just installed Office 2008 and Word lags behind my fingers by about 20
characters, even in draft view. This is very disconcerting as I write
directly onto the screen. I also interview people often, typing as they
talk. This is very difficult to do when Word is a few words behind!

I have an iBook with a 933 MHz G4 processor and I'm running OS X 4.11. I
can't upgrade to 5 yet because I have one app that still runs on Classic and
need to use it for another few months.

I've removed Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2008 but kept Entourage 2008 because
I need some emails received since upgrading. This seems to be okay with
Office 2004 running.

Am I doing anything wrong? Is there any way I can speed up Office 2008?

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Stephe -

I hate to be the one to break it to you, so I'll try to be as gentle as I
can Your trusty little iBook just doesn't have the horsepower to haul
Tiger & Office 2008 - Max RAM for that model is 640 MB & you need *at least*
1 GB to get any kind of acceptable performance. Combine the limited memory
with the other restrictions of the G4 architecture & the lag is quite
understandable. Leopard would make it worse, not better.

I'd suggest you stay with 2004 until you're ready to upgrade to a newer Mac.
You should have no problem with what you're currently doing as long as you
don't attempt to run Entourage 2004 now that you're using the 2008 version -
it would wreak havoc with the database file.

 

[Stephe]

Thanks! Yup, 2004 and Entourage 2008 seem to be working okay for me
(actually, Entourage 2004 kept crashing and 2008 seems pretty stable, so all
in all, I'm pretty happy).