mcjones@jumbo.dec.com (Paul McJones) (07/28/89)
Summary: The new release of Microsoft Excel--version 2.2--has apparently been optimized for a multimegabyte Macintosh II, resulting in bad performance and capacity penalties on 1 MByte, 68000 machines such as the Macintosh Plus and Macintosh SE. In fact, although I've upgraded to 2.2, I now intend to continue using 1.5. I believe Microsoft should warn users of the RAM and CPU requirements for good performance, and should consider continuing to sell version 1.5 (or perhaps a "stripped" version of 2.2) for owners of "entry level" machines. I'd like to hear from others who have used Excel 2.2 on a Macintosh Plus or SE. Send me email; I'll summarize for the net. Now that RAM is getting cheaper, I'd intended to upgrade my machine to 2.5 MBytes so that I could run MultiFinder + MS Word and a terminal emulator or Excel. Also, I know that Apple's System 7.0 will require 2 MBytes. But given the memory requirements of Excel 2.2 (and Word 4.0, but that's another story), I'm afraid 2.5 MBytes won't go very far! I bought Multiplan in 1984 and Word in 1985, and I've purchased every upgrade since then (switching to Excel when it first came out). This is the first time I've been disappointed: I paid $100 for a program that is almost unusable, and Microsoft gave me no hint that this would happen. From now on I won't purchase an upgrade until I've heard from many others how it works. If enough others feel as I do, perhaps we can get Microsoft's attention. More detail: For common operations, including loading the application, and opening, saving, and printing documents, Excel 2.2 is as much as 100% slower than Excel 1.5 running on my 1 MByte Macintosh Plus with DataFrame 20XP. I've also found that the size of the largest document that can be handled has shrunk by about a third. I ran benchmarks comparing versions 1.5 and 2.2. I found that loading the application slowed from 9 seconds to 17 seconds (perhaps not surprising since the size of the application grew from 451KBytes to 729KBytes!). Opening a document (a "database"--no formulas, about 1000 rows and 4 columns) slowed from 8 to 24 seconds. Print Preview slowed from 6 seconds to 14 seconds (to display the first page). As I ran these benchmarks, I noticed several signs that version 2.2 is now "thrashing" on a 1Mbyte machine: a) I repeated all my measurements three times. With version 1.5, there was little difference in the three trials, but with version 2.2, the first trial was often much slower than the next two, indicating that not all the code could fit in RAM. b) When I reran the benchmarks with the Macintosh's RAM cache set from 0K up to 64K, the version 1.5 times hardly changed, but some version 2.2 times slowed down, indicating that Excel's internal memory management no longer had enough RAM to work with. Paul McJones mcjones@src.dec.com (allegra, decvax, ucbvax)!decwrl!mcjones