MS Office 2007 - my perception or is it really slow?

[VladMM]

Hi,

Our company recently got the whole MSDN/MS Partner folder, and since Office 2007 was one of the CDs in the package I decided to give it a bash.

At that time I still had my old laptop, AMD Turion 64 with 1GB of RAM, running XP Pro. Off the bat, I noticed that the responsiveness of the apps (Outlook, Word and Excel in particular) seemed to be slower and in general felt more sluggish that 2003 did. I attributed this to my laptop getting on a bit, and I purchased a new one, C2D 2.0GHz, 2GB of RAM, this time running Vista Business 32bit.

I feel that Office 2007 is still slower - sometimes, writing emails lags so far behind my input, that I have to stop, close the email I'm writing, then open the draft and go on. This happens for no apparent reason.

The really, really bad part comes when I need to open an .xls spreadsheet or a .doc which is attached to an email. This is an excrutiating process which can sometimes take up to a minute to a minute and a half, during which I pretty much want to tear my hair out. I have modified the command line parameters for opening the file (got rid of the "/n" , added an "%1", played with DDE) but do what I can I simply can not get it to open at the same pace it does in Office 2003, and this is substantiated by comapring with my wife's laptop - which is running XP and 2003.

Has anyone else found this? I have read some articles that discussed the same symptopms, but nothing offers a solution. Is this because there isn't one, meaning that Office 2007 is a rushed product, seriously lacking?

Should I uninstall it and go back to 2003?

 

[Clocker]

I have a similar concern. I have a older centrino system with 512 megs of ram and outlook is indeed slower. But, I really enjoy the features that came with 2007. My question is whether my 512 megs of ram is a bottleneck. Should i upgrade to a gig?

Best

 

[esun]

I feel that it's slower, but not as slow as you've indicated. I've only used Word, Excel, and Powerpoint (I use Thunderbird rather than Outlook) and they are all very usable, though I'd agree they're a big slower than their older counterparts. It sounds mostly like Outlook is causing your problems, though. Do you notice a difference opening attachments directly from Outlook versus saving them locally and opening them from your Desktop or something?

 

[VladMM]

Not really, it is just as slow to open when I double click on it. It is hard to quantify what "a lot" slower means since it is so subjective, but it definitely is slower that 2003 - as you guys have noticed too.

 

[pmark]

I noticed that it is slower too. Outlook is much slower. I basically open it and then surf the net for a little bit before I'm able to check my email.

 

[Nizology]

I really don' think it is slower at all. Im running home premium with 3g of ram and a P4 3.4ghz and it's pretty snappy. Do you have other heavy programs running as well?

 

[VladMM]

Nope, none.

 

[Nocturnal]

Try and do the Windows Updates. There is an update that was recently released I'd say a month or two ago that speeds up Outlook significantly.

 

[VladMM]

Did all the updates, still very slow. I am not the only person having this problem, newsgroups are full of it and it is a documented issue - it just doesn't have a solution. Deleting items from XLStart doesn't help, playing with the CLI arguments ditto. Double clicking files, and opening them from Outlook is miserably slow. I hope this gets addressed in the SP or a update, since the product itself is good, I have a feeling it is a DDE issue.

In the meantime I have uninstalled 2007 and I am back to 2003 - everything is fast and responsive again

Thanks for the replies guys.