Word slowdown after installing CS2 on Mac.

December 17, 2006 4:36 PM

I recently installed Adobe's Creative Suite CS2 on my MacBook Pro. Since then, I've experienced an almost unbearable slowdown in Word. There must be some connection--anyone else have this problem?
posted by bronxteacher to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

My Word tends to load really slowly, I think it might have to do with the number of fonts I have (which could be what's going on). Does it work slowly overall or just loading up?
posted by starman at 4:44 PM on December 17, 2006

Are you trying to run both Word and one of the Adobe apps at the same time? The PowerPC emulator (Rosetta) can take a lot of memory to do its work, so you probably are just running low on memory -- how much RAM do you have? More always helps.
posted by xil at 5:05 PM on December 17, 2006

Response by poster: I have 2gigs of Ram, and even when I'm running Word on its' own it's really, really slow, especially when switching between windows. I get the disco ball whenever I switch between open Word docs, and that never happened before. Definitely not a Ram issue, or having too many apps open.

Any other ideas?
posted by bronxteacher at 5:14 PM on December 17, 2006

Did you do the standard troubleshooting checklist? Toss preferences, fix permissions, etc.?
posted by lovejones at 5:27 PM on December 17, 2006

Response by poster: I've fixed permissions, but not tossed the prefs. Is that standard? How would I do that?

Thanks.
posted by bronxteacher at 5:35 PM on December 17, 2006

If you installed Acrobat with CS2, could it be related to the Acrobat plugin for Word?
posted by holgate at 5:53 PM on December 17, 2006

Having a large number of fonts can be an issue for Microsoft Word, as starman said.

On windows there's a adobe plugin for word called PDFMaker, which can have deleterious effects on word's performance. There may be something like that on Mac as well.

My bet is the fonts though.
posted by tiamat at 6:35 PM on December 17, 2006

I also think it is the fonts. Word has a terrible time with systems that have a lot of fonts installed.

Welcome to Microsoft engineering for the Mac.
posted by camworld at 7:47 PM on December 17, 2006

yeah, the fonts. CS2 comes with Fonts. Word is a bitch once you get beyong X number of fonts.
posted by dobbs at 8:38 PM on December 17, 2006

If it is the fonts, you can disable them with the FontBook app. And then, of course, re-enable fonts when you want them.
posted by niles at 9:58 PM on December 17, 2006

Word running through Rosetta gets staggeringly slow when you start adding things like large bitmaps, so if you've started using more images in your documents since installing CS2 that might explain it..?
posted by malevolent at 11:49 PM on December 17, 2006

Is there anything like OLE on Mac that could be the source of the conflict? On my PC, there's an "Adobe Photoshop Image" that appears on my "objects" list in Word.
posted by spiderskull at 12:37 AM on December 18, 2006

Try reinstalling Word. My Excel got slower and slower to open, and started creating zillions of files in my trash can every day. A nice clean reinstall whipped it back into shape.
posted by bink at 6:24 AM on December 18, 2006

I just had a similar problem. Running the Unix-tasks using Maintidget made it well again. You can use similar tools, like Yasu, Cocktail, Onyx, etc, or just run
sudo periodic daily monthly weekly
from the Terminal.
posted by KimG at 3:27 PM on December 18, 2006

I also vote FONTS. It might've wrote over one of MS Word's precious crappy fonts - MS is particularly picky. I once deleted a font and Entourage stopped working and all I got was an ERROR 18. When I went to MS HELP DB - this was the answer to search for ERROR 18?

Error 18 ... (wait for it)

"is an Error message"

$2 Billion dollars worth of server, lines of code and software to tell me that?

I finally re-installed everything and once all the fonts were back - no matter how useless they seem ...

Also check out: Linotype FontExplorer X

FREE for managing fonts.
posted by jbelkin at 4:23 PM on December 18, 2006