[B Gallagher]

Hello all,

I'm running 10.4.9 on a PB G4 with 1.5G of RAM, and am using MS Word 2004.

This is what my CPU usage looks like just after I log in:


This is what it looks like when I open the file I'm working on (60k, 7 pages, has both English and Japanese text in it):


And this is what the CPU usage is like when I scroll through the document. The left side is when I scroll slowly, and the right side is when I scroll quickly:


A copy of the file I'm using is available here. For reference, I get less CPU usage (it's still there, but not as much) and smoother scrolling on a 5.4MB, 122 page word file.

It seems strange to me that something seemingly as simple as scrolling through a Word document would put that much of a load on the CPU. Does anyone know if this is normal?

Thanks.

[Sethro]

That is actually a little odd considering that your Powerbook runs on a PPC Processor and not an Intel CPU which eliminates the need for Rosetta emulation software. Your RAM looks pretty good too, what I would do is try to repair permissions and verify that everything that is running the way it should.

As a last resort I would try to go ahead and reinstall Microsoft Office from stratch and make sure that you have installed all the updates via Microsoft AutoUpdate. I also noticed that your running Mac OSX 10.4.9 maybe you should try upgrading to Mac OSX 10.4.10 perhaps the issues has been resolved in the update.

EDIT: I opened the same file with my Macbook and got these results. Keep in mind that I'm using an Intel CPU.

[Nivag]

I've got a 1st Gen Black MacBook with 2GB of Ram and Word idles the same as Sethro and when scrolling up and down hits 50-60%

NeoOffice on the same doc idles at 0.10%, scrolling 20-24%

Both Word and NeoOffice are the latest version running on 10.4.10

[Jowy]

Just throwing out a wild guess, but could it be the check spelling and grammar as you type feature that might be causing such a high level of usage?

[Cadaver]

Turn off Live Word Count. This helps a lot. For some reason, Live Word Count really sucks up processor cycles. Classic Microsoft-for-Mac programming (read: crappy).