On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 10:04 +0800, Rob Phillips wrote: > Now that I have had my 15" intel-based MacBook Pro for a month or so, > I can comment on its speed relative to the old 17" G4 Powerbook 1.25 > Ghz I had. Both machines had/have 2Gb RAM. > > Overall, I find the new machine to be slower. My usual apps are > Eudora, Word and Excel, and I often work with large documents with > tables and large spreadsheets. The new machine is much slower in > handling these. I often get a delay of a second when I try to scroll > through a doc. The machine seems to work fine for minutes and then I > get a rotating globe for a couple of seconds.
Office is a PPC app, so will be running in Rosetta. Also, Rosetta apps use *twice* the amount of ram a native app would, so if you have a number of rosetta apps running, you will find that ram being chewed up quite quickly. Don't forget, Rosetta is trying to convert PPC code into Intel code on the fly. Think how slow Virtual PC is on a PPC Mac, which puts Rosetta in perspective (I think Apple did a fantastic job in getting Rosetta to run - check out the efforts of Pear PC :-) ) > > Printing is really bad. Sometimes I wait 5 secs waiting for the > Print Dialog to load. Are you using a network printer? Maybe the Mac is searching for the printer first before displaying the dialog. > > Do other people have similar experiences? Is this because Word and > Excel aren't intel native? Or is it because they're M$ products? When running Intel apps, my iMac flies! Crunching video is where I have seen the biggest increase. I think you will see a decent speed increase with 10.5. I'd put my money on that there will be a lot of optimisations geared towards Intel Macs in the next full OS release. Seeya Rod!
