Slow MS Office Performance

[wowoah]

Hey all. I'm a switcher who just got his brand spankin' new PowerBook this Monday and I have to say I LOVE it. It's admittedly not as snappy as WinXP, but it more than makes up for that with its elegance, stability, and usability.

However, being a switcher and all, it's been absolutely necessary for me to use MS Office, since all my past schoolwork is on that. Until I can scrounge up the money to get a Mac version, however, I've been using the MS Office TestDrive that came preinstalled. The only problem is that it's really really really slow. Okay, I exaggerate, it's actually not all that slow, usually, but whenever Word has to do some kind of AutoFormat or AutoCorrect function (i.e., automatically creating lists or stuff), the entire computer grinds to a halt for about 3 seconds. This gets incredibly annoying when I'm in class.

Has MS issued a patch or anything to correct this issue? Does anyone else have any problems like this that they've figured a way to work around? I'm assuming MS won't let me upgrade the TestDrive version, but I'd just like to know if I'll still have to deal with this after dishing out the $99 or so for the Office Student/Teacher version. It probably won't affect my buying decision, since there's really no viable alternative to MS Office for the Mac right now, but I'd like to know nonetheless.

Thanks for all the help!

 

[krohde]

I dont know which version the trial software runs but I saw some minor speed improvements when I updated my full version. The student version is 'only' about $99 so if you party a little less here in the beginning when most students have the most money you might be able to save up for it.

You didnt post how much RAM you have installed, but the more the better, so if you are only sitting with 256 maybe it wouldnt be a bad idea to get a little more.

I also had some trouble myself with the responsiveness of my GUI but then i downloaded Onyx from versiontracker.com/macosx/ and that has some maintenance scripts that speeded it up quite a bit. Also dont forget to run disc utility in Applications/Utilities/ and click the repair permissions. I run this once a month and that keeps it a little snappier because they do tend to get messed up and it does all slow down the system because it's unix i guess.

KR