Mac Forum / Applications / MS Office / February 2006

Hi,

I am running a G5 Imac 1.8Ghz and a G4 Powerbook 1.5GHz and have been
happily running office X on both machines for as long as I've owned
them (1 and 2 years respectively)  Before the Pbook, I also had an I
book running Office X for 18 months with no troubles.

I just installed Office 2004 2 weeks ago, and am consistently noticing,
on both machines, serious system slowdown over the course of the day.
To the point where, by mid-afternooon, my system needs to be restarted.
The symptoms are identical on both macs (naturally the Pbook runs even
slower than the G5 as these problems advance).

My day consists of using entourage extensively all day long, Word and
Excel sporadically, and Firefox and/or Safari, usually with quite a few
tabs open at once.  A day rarley goes by that I don't run two or three
searches in Entourage, tackling a database of about 8000 messages, if I
choose to search the root folder...

Under my normal useage as desctribed, everthing ran smoothly over the
past 3 years with Office X as the cornerstone of my operations.
NOW....with office 2004 my macs are, by mid day, choking on something.
I can't switch readily between tabs in my browsers, and eventually the
browsers seem to almost lock up if I work a long enough day (and browse
a handful of sites).  The only thing that prevents this behavior is
running an entire session without ever launching any office 2004
products (like a weekend day spend browsing the web instead of working
on projects that require office).  On those days it's as though nothing
has changed.

My gut feeling is that there is a failure in 2004 to allocate memory
properly (is microsoft being a "hog" in this case??) and more
importantly, release memory when it's no longer used.

I consider myself a slightly advanced user, but this one seems like a
deeper problem than I am able to solve with a few settings adjusted...
The mac is almost behaving as though it's infected with some of the
overwrought elements one finds in a Windows XP machine (Anecdotally: I
once was a Windows user...ever tried their system search in XP (the one
with the puppy)?  -It always made me long, desperately, for the at
least 100% faster search that ran in Windows 98...)

My work life was less complicated prior to this "upgrade"....so I'm
seriously thinking about getting back to office X so that I can have
both macs perfoming again,  all the live-long day!

Does anyone know how to move Entourage databases back to Office X, and
if so, what might be lost in the process??

Thanks,
Dave