[comp.sys.mac] odd behaviour of MS Word and System 6.0.3 on an SE/30

js@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Jay Sekora) (01/05/90)

A client here is having an odd problem with Microsoft Word on his new
Mac SE/30.  When he chooses Page Preview in the middle of a long
document (with lots of math), Word seemd to go through the entire
document twice (as indicated by page numbers above the preview area)
before displaying the page.  In the Page Preview mode, scrolling is
extremely slow.  This problem occurs under MultiFinder and UniFinder
both, whether or not the RAM cache is turned on.  It happens even when
booting from a plain vanilla system disk (he has an 80M hard disk, but
we tried reinstalling the system and also "desanctifying" the Blessed
Folder and booting from a floppy).  It persists after zapping PRAM.

However, it does NOT occur on other Macs.  For instance, I booted his
Mac SE/30 from a vanilla system disk and opened one of his Word
documents and saw this problem.  I then booted my Mac SE from the very
same system disk, checked that my copy of Word 4.0 had the same
creation date, and opened the same document, and Page Preview worked
normally.

Other things in Word 4.0 (like normal scrolling) seem to be
slower-than-normal as well.  Excel gives a system bomb on his Mac
(even booting from a vanilla floppy), although it runs fine on my Mac
(even booting from the same floppy).  What's more, the System is being
allocated about 400K under MultiFinder, and *about 100K under Finder*,
even though on my the same system, booting from the same system
folder, is allocated over 600K in MultiFinder or Finder.

We have also tried most of this on another SE/30.  The problems seem
to be unique to his particular Mac.  He has an SE/30 with an 80 Meg
hard disk and 4 Meg of RAM.

This seems really flaky to me, and I don't expect it's the sort of
thing anyone's going to be able to help me with (unless it's something
really obvious I'm missing--I'm pretty Mac-literate, but I'm not very
familiar with MS Word), but I thought I'd try anyway.  Has anyone had
similar problems with MS Word under similar circumstances, or has
anyone had similar memory-allocation wierdnesses on a Mac with 4 Meg
of RAM?

If you have any ideas what might be going on, please send me e-mail (I
don't get to read this group regularly).  Note that this behaviour
seems to be independent of which system folder is being used.

Thanks,
	-j.
_____________________________________________________________________
Jay Sekora		             |       js@phoenix.princeton.edu
Information Centers Consultant       |                 js@pucc.bitnet
Princeton University	             |         sekora-jay@cs.yale.edu

js@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Jay Sekora) (01/05/90)

ADDENDUM: I should mention that I did check for viri.  WDEF was present,
but the problem did not go away after removing it.
-j.
--
_____________________________________________________________________
Jay Sekora		             |       js@phoenix.princeton.edu
Information Centers Consultant       |                 js@pucc.bitnet
Princeton University	             |         sekora-jay@cs.yale.edu