Office 2007 - memory hog?

[rockymtnhigh]

So, I did an upgrade to Office 2007 Student/Teacher a month ago, so I could take advantage of Excel's new capabilities of huge spreadsheets. I have to admit that the suite is starting to grow on me. Oh, the ribbon has its moments. You keep looking for something that you know is there, but by god, its lost. But I am finding that the more I use it, the easier it gets.

But is it me, or is this suite a serious memory hog? I have never had my XP Laptop give me more "running short on memory, increasing page size" then since using this suite pretty extensively in the past couple weeks.

I ended up throwing in an extra Gb of ram to try to accomodate it (heck, laptop ram is now dirt cheap). But I definitely notice that it works a helluva lot better on the new dual-core w/2GB in my office, then it is on this Pentium-M, 2 1/2 yr old laptop.

 

[charper1]

I use it home (PC & Laptop) and work with XP. PCs each have 2GB and laptop has 1GB. None have given me any resource issues.

Home PC is a AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor

Homp Laptop is a Intel Centrino Carmel

Work PC is a Pentium4 Prescott 2Mxe

 

[charper1]

How many background processes & services do you have running ?

 

[rockymtnhigh]

How many background processes & services do you have running ?

I have cut down the background processes as much as I can. Its amazing how much crap builds up there.

It definitely runs great on the 2GB desktop. And it is doing better now that I went from 1 to 1.5GB of ram on the laptop (I am going to get it to 2GB, but could only find one stick).

I think its the combination of having Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and SPSS running at the same time. lot of processing going on.

 

[DSpud]

Well dependign on what you consider a memory hog. For a new computer, i dont' believe it is a memory hog at all. If you are using it on a 2 year or older box with less than 1 gb ram, yeah, it could be hogging the available memory on that box.

 

[charper1]

My laptop mentioned above is 2003 or 4 with only 1GB, no issues. It all really comes down to a computers setup and efficiency. There really can't be any one-size fits all answer as to age, RAM or CPU capacity.

 

[DSpud]

Yeah, I should have mentioned how the OS is set up and startup programs, etc. The biggest eaters of speed and RAM are those little programs that run everytime you start up your computer. Control those and reduce them to a minimum, and even a 5-8 year old computer will run quick enough for Any office application.

I actually took some surplus computers (Dell) from the state and cleaned them up, formatted the hard drive and installed clean versions of Windows XP Professional on them. They run faster than the brand new off the shelf computer my office bought 6 months ago. The bought one was a Pentium Dual Core with 1 GB DDR2 RAM. The ones I rebuilt were Pentium 4's with 768 MB DDR RAM originally built in 2002.

The difference is the store bought PC had about 10 worthless startup programs that bogged it down, bigtime.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

I went into msconfig, and wiped out several programs; but its annoying Lenovo has about 10 or 12 processes itself, and its pretty hard to tell which ones are needed and which ones are not. I guess I need to start googling each one and see what I find.

I guess I may have been a bit unclear; I can run each and every program; the memory hog issue comes from running several, and then having the system tell me it is running out of memory.

For me the downside with a laptop is that it isn't quite as easy as a desktop to just wipe the hard drive and just do a fresh install of the OS - to clean things out. So many drivers specific to the machine, I'd be a bit nerved by the prospect.

 

[DSpud]

Probably can go to the laptops website and download all the drivers there. I had to do the same thing when I rebuilt those dells.

 

[RandallA]

I went into msconfig, and wiped out several programs; but its annoying Lenovo has about 10 or 12 processes itself, and its pretty hard to tell which ones are needed and which ones are not. I guess I need to start googling each one and see what I find.

I guess I may have been a bit unclear; I can run each and every program; the memory hog issue comes from running several, and then having the system tell me it is running out of memory.

For me the downside with a laptop is that it isn't quite as easy as a desktop to just wipe the hard drive and just do a fresh install of the OS - to clean things out. So many drivers specific to the machine, I'd be a bit nerved by the prospect.

I had to do a fresh WinXP install on a ThinkPad for a user and all the drivers are on their website. The laptop originally came with Vista and 2 GB of RAM and it was very slow. We decided to install XP and the laptop is more responsive.

As far as your original question, I'd say yes Office 2007 uses more resources than Office 2003 or Office XP. Any computer with 2 GB should be able to handle it well though.

 

[Poke]

We have been using Office 2007 for awhile now had no major issues. I really like the new Outlook anyway make sure to install Service Pack 1 for Office 2007. They made some improvements plus fix some other issues as well..

 

[rockymtnhigh]

We have been using Office 2007 for awhile now had no major issues. I really like the new Outlook anyway make sure to install Service Pack 1 for Office 2007. They made some improvements plus fix some other issues as well..

Not using Outlook. I am a gmail guy. :--)