Hi Antoine:
On 4/05/08 5:50 AM, in article ee9a716.0@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"AntoineP@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <AntoineP@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I have been told by a page designer that Office uses too much RAM and
that
> might cause the crash. Others I consulted do not agree with that
explanation.
The "others" are correct. There are a lot of myths and rumours running
around about the memory demands of modern software.
Office 2008 requires a gig of memory to run. It will survive down to
about
256 MB, but it will get very, very slow. To run "well" on big do***ents,
you will find 2 GB of memory well worth the investment, particularly on a
PowerPC, where the code expands in memory to be twice the size of Intel
code.
However, the amount of memory Word actually "needs" is not particularly
related to do***ent size. Word tries to be economical with memory, and
will
use only what it needs. However, if the system has plenty of memory to
spare, Word will use a bit of it to speed things up. It doesn't have to
have it, but it will run a lot faster if it's available.
I can understand why a page designer might think Word is using too much
memory, given that they often load up 2,000 fonts (at half a megabyte
each!!) and then wonder where all their memory went :-) I have 201 fonts
on
the system :-)
Sitting here doing nothing much while I am answering questions, Word 2008
is
sitting on about 77 MB of real memory. It has reserved another 650 MB or
so
of disk space in case it needs to page stuff in or out, but it's not
actually using it. So it's a chunky little application, but it's using
less
than Safari, by quite a bit.
If I open a few large and complex do***ents and start working vigorously
on
them, Word will suck a lot more memory if it's free, or get quite slow if
it's not. Since I prefer to get my work done quickly, I am prepared to
shell out for the memory that takes.
Hope this helps
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:john@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|
