Random Flux

No, the computer itself isn’t slow but many aspects of the user interface are, and after the initial euphoria of the new Mac it’s beginning to annoy me a lot. Where Windows dialogs snap onto the screen many Mac windows and dialogs appear to pause for a moment before responding to your request, as though they’re considering whether they really want to do it or not. The whole user interface just has a slightly “slow” and unresponsive feel to it compared to XP. On my old G4 Power Mac I simply assumed this was the slow processor but this doesn’t seem to be the cause. At least, I don’t think the Mac Pro with its four processor cores running at 2.66GHz can be accused of being underpowered here…

This does not really cause slower working, it’s just subjectively very unpleasant and I find that it makes me tense while working with the Mac, as though I’m constantly internally trying to push it to pull its finger out and get a move on. This is particularly annoying in Word — I know it’s a PPC application running in Rosetta, but its response to typing is so slow that I feel like I’m working on a totally underpowered machine. I very often type faster than it can keep up and the letters only appear on the screen when I pause for a second or so. This is seriously annoying. The same with dialogs, when I select Print or Fax or Thesaurus the dialog kind of waits and then drifts onto the screen slowly.

Again, the computer itself is probably not slow. But the subjective experience is of working on a slow machine and I’m finding that I’m liking that less and less all the time.

So far I haven’t been able to find any kind of setting in the system options that might speed things up (if anyone knows ehre “Deactivate dialog response delay” is then please let me know…).

I know that the only workaround for Word is to wait until the universal version comes out, but if that doesn’t get more responsive I’m going to have to seriously consider going back to a PC, particularly if Word 2008 isn’t a really MAJOR improvement on the Word in Office 2004 for Mac, which is significantly inferior to Word 2003 on the PC in many intensely annoying ways. For example:

• Word 2003 PC can identify the spellcheck language automatically.
  This is great when working on translations of documents because I don’t constantly have to reset the language of new paragraphs. (When translating I often simply work directly in the original document, overwriting and translating as I go.) Word 2004 Mac can’t do this and it really slows me down.
• Word 2004 Mac deletes the contents of forms when you unprotect and reprotect the document.
  I use protected documents containing forms for my invoices and some other things. Sometimes I need to make a minor change in the background document before mailing it — in Word 2004 Mac this erases all the contents of the form when I reprotect the document. This makes me want to go out and kill someone with a baseball bat.
• AutoText doesn’t work properly in Word 2004 Mac.
  In Word 2003 PC you can create short abbreviations for your AutoText entries and activate them with a trigger. On Word 2004 Mac you have to type about eight characters of the autotext and then wait until a little tooltip pops onto the screen and then press Enter. This is crazy and a total waste of time, particularly since Word on the Intel Mac is so painfully sluggish anyway. I know I could get an external text expander program like TextExpander, but why should I when Word should be able to do this?

And as I just noticed while typing this post, typing in the WordPress editor on the Mac is also pretty sluggish. Come on, on a 4-processor, 2.66GHz machine? This is crazy….