OP
menace3054
Guest
hey everyone. shes running excel 2004, the latest version. shes calculating simple calculations in excel, but filling down 3000+ entires. granted that is a lot of entries, but it does it almost instantly on my windows desktop, and it takes a minute or two on her laptop.. any other ideas?.. is there anyway to test to see if the memory chip i just installed is faulty or not? the system reads it as being there, but theres no way i can be sure that its actually working..
OP
MoltenLava
Guest
If you saw any speed increase after rebooting and running permission fix, it's probably caused by the reboot, not by the permission fix. Believe it or not, OS do leak memory, and over time you might feel the computer getting sluggish which can often be remedied by rebooting. Permission fix is just that, fixing file permissions on the disk.
Cron is a software that can run some specified task every some interval. Like you mentioned, cron can be used to rotate old logs. You can use cron to remove temporary files in regular basis. You can run cron even to fix file permissions in regular basis if you wanted to.
Lastly, back to the original question. Taking a minute or two running excel seems plain wrong. I can only speculate without knowing details. One possibility is that the memory on her laptop is inadequate for Microsoft Excel software. I think you mentioned she had 380MB of memory. In my experience, Mac applications take up about 1.5 to 2x the space of comparable Windows apps. Windows laptop with 380MB or 512MB is plenty enough to do almost anything. On the other hand, Mac with less than 512MB of memory usually suffer from inadequate memory. One symptom that happens when the machine is out of memory is it starts dumping memory content to the disk, called swapping. When that happens the system slows down a lot, causing a simple task for a minute or two to complete.
There is a tool that comes with Panther that's very useful for diagnosing this kind of problem. It's called Activity Monitor, and it's in utilities section. Fire it up, run the Excel calculation and take a look at these three sections: CPU, memory, disk. I would look at the memory section first. If you don't see any free memory or very little free memory left, you need to get more memory to your system. In the disk section, see if you notice any disk reads and writes reported there. Excel calculation is purely CPU bound, and should involve little disk access. If you see some sizable disk activities, her machine may be suffering from swapping, resulting from not enough memory.
As for your newly added memory, if the system reports it, then it is being used. You should be able to see the increase in the Activity monitor memory section.
Cron is a software that can run some specified task every some interval. Like you mentioned, cron can be used to rotate old logs. You can use cron to remove temporary files in regular basis. You can run cron even to fix file permissions in regular basis if you wanted to.
Lastly, back to the original question. Taking a minute or two running excel seems plain wrong. I can only speculate without knowing details. One possibility is that the memory on her laptop is inadequate for Microsoft Excel software. I think you mentioned she had 380MB of memory. In my experience, Mac applications take up about 1.5 to 2x the space of comparable Windows apps. Windows laptop with 380MB or 512MB is plenty enough to do almost anything. On the other hand, Mac with less than 512MB of memory usually suffer from inadequate memory. One symptom that happens when the machine is out of memory is it starts dumping memory content to the disk, called swapping. When that happens the system slows down a lot, causing a simple task for a minute or two to complete.
There is a tool that comes with Panther that's very useful for diagnosing this kind of problem. It's called Activity Monitor, and it's in utilities section. Fire it up, run the Excel calculation and take a look at these three sections: CPU, memory, disk. I would look at the memory section first. If you don't see any free memory or very little free memory left, you need to get more memory to your system. In the disk section, see if you notice any disk reads and writes reported there. Excel calculation is purely CPU bound, and should involve little disk access. If you see some sizable disk activities, her machine may be suffering from swapping, resulting from not enough memory.
As for your newly added memory, if the system reports it, then it is being used. You should be able to see the increase in the Activity monitor memory section.
OP
ghenrytaylor
Guest
I have Onyx, run it periodically, also have macjanitor, Yasu, as well as do daily and weekly crons from Terminal. I've never noticed a slow down from any of these, then again I wasn't looking either. Perhaps I'll run one app for a month and note my observations.Padawan said:I think the delay has a lot to do with the fact that OnyX clears certain caches and "resets" certain things, so it takes a bit of time to boot up on the initial restart. I've noticed a delay upon the initial reboot too, but after that, it's great.
Let ya know if I see anything.
I am on an older machine though, G3, 700, 640 ram.
Thoughts anyone?
OP
menace3054
Guest
i looked under activity monitor, and it said i had 60mb free memory, while excel was doing that calculation, and it still took a long time..
OP
menace3054
Guest
never mind, it does that **** on my powerbook too, and thres no way thats too slow for excel. i have 768mb ram and 1.33 g4. i guess its crappy microsofts crappy programs
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2003
- Messages
- 1,246
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 36
- Location
- I'm slowly sinking in the posts of Mac-forums
- Your Mac's Specs
- PowerBook 12" Combo Drive/867 MHz/256 MB RAM/40 GB hard drive/Mac OS X 10.3.5/AirPort Extreme it sux
Microsoft Office isn't the fastest Office suit around.
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2004
- Messages
- 475
- Reaction score
- 3
- Points
- 18
- Location
- Portland, OR
- Your Mac's Specs
- 15" MacBook Pro, 13" MacBook Black, 15" iMac G4, 24" iMac (soon!)
menace3054,
The simple answer, that nobody in here wants to give you, is that Macs simply aren't as fast as PCs, especially when it comes to floating point operatings that aren't optimized for the Altivec engine (such as Excel).
No amount of repairing permissions is going to fix that.
Secondly, tests have been run that show Microsoft purposely slows down their Mac versions of their software. A childish marketing ploy, if you ask me. But what can you do...
The simple answer, that nobody in here wants to give you, is that Macs simply aren't as fast as PCs, especially when it comes to floating point operatings that aren't optimized for the Altivec engine (such as Excel).
No amount of repairing permissions is going to fix that.
Secondly, tests have been run that show Microsoft purposely slows down their Mac versions of their software. A childish marketing ploy, if you ask me. But what can you do...
OP
Nightblade
Guest
Yeah, Osiris is right. Putting the Mac vs. PC in speed arguments aside, Microsoft has made two different products here. Microsoft Office for Windows, and Microsoft Office for Mac. They have the exact same features as each other (approximately), but they each run on different platforms on different processor types. Microsoft owns both of these products, but they also own Windows. Obviously, they're gonna optimize Office to run seamlessly with Windows, as they're both products made by the same company (just as Apple optimizes many of their products to run the best on Macs). And again, it is possible that Microsoft slows down the Mac version purposely. And yeah, that does suck, but on a really fast Mac they should be efficient. For optimized performance with Office (or any application for that matter), quit the other ones open (except for the Finder). Or if you don't want to quit them, 'freeze' them, with this utility called CunningFox:
http://www.donelleschi.com/cunningfox/
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13433
So, it lets you temporarily freeze applications to allocate all the power to the one that's open. After you finish your task, you unfreeze the other applications. It's a useful utility, but it's actually shareware, and so they keep asking for a purchase every single time you start up your computer. It's annoying, yes, and that's why I actually got rid of it, but I'm thinking of downloading it again. You might want to give it a shot.
Once installed, this utility can be operated from the bottom-left corner of the screen. You'll see what I mean....
http://www.donelleschi.com/cunningfox/
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13433
So, it lets you temporarily freeze applications to allocate all the power to the one that's open. After you finish your task, you unfreeze the other applications. It's a useful utility, but it's actually shareware, and so they keep asking for a purchase every single time you start up your computer. It's annoying, yes, and that's why I actually got rid of it, but I'm thinking of downloading it again. You might want to give it a shot.
Once installed, this utility can be operated from the bottom-left corner of the screen. You'll see what I mean....
OP
Nightblade
Guest
No prob
Shop Amazon
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.