[X4U] Word is Slooooow

Zane H. Healy healyzh at aracnet.com
Tue Aug 7 16:58:08 PDT 2007


Shawn King wrote:
> On 8/7/07 3:34 PM, "Earle Jones" <earle.jones at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> > Some of us felt that Word hit its performance peak with version 5.1
> > and has been going downhill ever since.
> 
> I certainly am in that camp.

While I've not used stock 6.0 itself (I had the version they updated for
speed, 6.0.1 I think), owned every version from 5.1 - 2004 with the
exception of 2001.  Of these I've probably used 6.0.1 and 2004 the most.

I found 6.0.1 to be a little slow on some things, but overall it was quite
usable and preferable to WordPerfect and ClarisWorks (which I also owned
copies of).  This was on a PowerBook 520c 68LC040/25Mhz system.  When I
upgraded to a PowerMac 8500/180 it worked just fine.  I used it until I
bought a G4/450 AGP and upgraded to Office 98 (I honestly don't remember why
I upgraded).  I ran Office 98 until I finally upgraded to Mac OS X 10.2,
then I bougth Office.X.  Then I got a G5 2x2 and upgraded to Office 2004
Professional (for Virtual PC) as soon as it was available.  I've never had
any performace complaints since I moved off of the PowerBook 520c, the same
can not be said with some of the other Word Processors I've tried.

Actually I just realized that I do have one performance complaint about Word
2004, if left running long enough (several weeks) it sucks up more CPU
cycles than it should.  Having said that, it is not as bad in this regard as
Firefox.  Still it performs just fine.

	Zane



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