Help! Slow Word & PP Slow: New Comp

[pdfernan]

I recently purchased a new Dell Inspiron 1405 with 1 gig of ram and a 1.73Ghz processor. It is my first computer with Windows Vista. It runs perfectly fine most of the time, but the main reason we purchased it was for my fiancée to do her translation work.

Unfortunately Microsoft Word and Powerpoint both run extremely slow! They load fine, and work alright for a little bit, but after a few minutes they both begin to have horrible lag so that it is nearly imposable to type and have the words appear in real time. This could happen in other programs, but we do not use anything else besides the internet enough to notice.

I have worked with the Dell technical help and they have been unable to resolve the problem, spending most of their time deleting unnecessary programs to help speed up the computer, but it has not made a difference in this problem.

I have also re-installed Microsoft Office, downloaded all of Dell's and Vista's patches etc... to no avial.

Anyone have any ideas? I've been assured many times that my specifications should be sufficient to run Word, but i am beginning to doubt it. I don't really know much about Vista or how much memory it requires.

[BertImmenschuh]

I was looking in Crucial for something else and looked up your Inspiron E1405 [don't forget the E].

Usually adding RAM makes a big difference in programs such as she is using in addition to video editing, large databases and large spreadsheets.

Upgrading the RAM is really not that expensive when considering the frustrations of programs not working right.
http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Inspiron+E1405

It that Notebook has the 32-bit version of Vista the 4GB will show as only 3.5GB or a bit less due to limitations of 32-bit, doesn't apply to the 64-bit version.

[tracyhop]

I had the exact same problem with MS Word 2007 after loading ThreatFire on my new Vista notebook PC. Typing was unbearably slow in Word with ThreatFire installed. I contacted PC Tools Software customer support and they offered the following reply:

>Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We can see a slight delay when the first time you open Word but after its cached we don't see. We will continue to look into this.
>
>Regards,
>Armando
>PC Tools Software

My problem persisted during entire sessions in Word. Oddly, sometime the problem would inexplicably go away. Then, next time I used Word, it would be back and stay. VERY FRUSTRATING. I ended up removing ThreatFire and the problem has never returned. I think it was a problem with the anti-Keylogger function in ThreatFire. I really would like to use ThreatFire, but this problem made MS Word miserable to use, so I had to get rid of TF. If PC Tools can fix this problem with Word, I'll gladly use their software again.

[tom.tdw]

you could try OpenOffice, it runs much faster than MS office

I had some issues with office 2007 (it took 10 minutes to open (literally)) on one PC so i ditched Vista for Ubuntu (my OS of choice)

ubuntu is free (much cheaper than upgrading RAM), and the 64bit version is much better supported than 64bit windows