MS Word and Rosetta

jfruhjfruh
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hi all-



I have a friend who has wants to upgrade her ancient (circa 1999) iMac. She really only wants a computer that does the basics -- e-mail, Web surfing, word processing -- but she DOES need to use MS Word.



I am thinking of recommending the high-end Mac Mini to her, but I am a little concerned about the fact that that MS Office is not yet a Universal Binary. Is anyone else using Word on a lower-end Intel Mac? Is the performance acceptable in terms of speed and stability? I'm guessing the more RAM you have, the better Rosetta performs -- how much would you recommend?



(I know I'm going to get some responses saying that she doesn't need Word because she can use open source program X Y and Z, but really, she does, for her job. Sorry.)

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    blenngblenng Posts: 17member
    Hey



    On other boards, I've heard people complain about the speed of MS office on a single core mini. I am using a MBP and I think MS office runs slow, so I would recommend the dual core mini with at least 1 gig RAM.



    It's not fast, but it's acceptable.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    brussellbrussell Posts: 9,812member
    Word will run much faster on Intel under Rosetta than her G3 iMac.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    hanenthanent Posts: 19member
    I used MS Office on MB with 512MB RAM..it was real slow!!

    I couldn't understand why it was so slow since I also run it on my intel iMac, and it's pretty fast.

    I figured memory was the problem, so I added an extra 1G Ram to make it 1.25G.

    Wow..what a difference!! It rocks, don't listen to those who says it's terribly slow becz of rosetta..increased system memory is the answer to overcoming rosetta.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    sammi josammi jo Posts: 4,634member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by hanent

    I used MS Office on MB with 512MB RAM..it was real slow!!

    I couldn't understand why it was so slow since I also run it on my intel iMac, and it's pretty fast.

    I figured memory was the problem, so I added an extra 1G Ram to make it 1.25G.

    Wow..what a difference!! It rocks, don't listen to those who says it's terribly slow becz of rosetta..increased system memory is the answer to overcoming rosetta.



    I have just been going through hell on earth trying to run MS Office on a pair of Mac Mini singlecore Intels. After a a week of emails and phonecalls from both MS and Apple tech support (they were blaming each other, of course), to make a bad situation marginally workable entailed replacing the two 256mB cards that came with the machine with a pair of 1gB RAM cards. These were supplied to me, by Apple free of charge.



    The problem with these Mac Minis (singles) is that, because they do not have a dedicated graphics card with its own RAM, graphics functions eat into the system RAM, causing memory paging between RAM and hard disk when running RAM intensive apps (read bloatware). And that means painfully slow operation... horrible... unless a perpetually spinning beachball can be classed as "entertainment".



    Quote:

    Word will run much faster on Intel under Rosetta than her G3 iMac.



    That of course depends upon the version of MS Word. The G3 chip is architecturally similar to the G4, except it doesnt have the latter's inbuilt AltiVec multimedia hardware (and I don't think Word makes use of the AltiVec instruction set.. .. is that true?). I have an old G4 Cube which runs an older version of Word much much more snappily than the new Mac Mini even after installing that new 2gB of RAM.



    Trying to run Word on a stock Intel Mac Mini single with 512mB RAM is a non starter. Even the upgrade to 2 gB, although it does provide some improvement, it is just a brute method of overcoming a flawed design. I would advise don't even go there unless you want to sabotage your workspace. The intel/Rosetta iMac works far better
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