News and Reviews > Mini-Reviews by Members
MS Office 2013 US$9.95 Corporate/Enterprise Home Use Program - Mini-Review
dr_andus:
...but I'd rather stick with Office 2010 than switch full Aero back on.
_____________________
-dr_andus (March 13, 2014, 09:26 AM)
--- End quote ---
Why? :tellme:
-IainB (March 14, 2014, 05:55 AM)
--- End quote ---
Because, as I've discovered after switching it off, my 3-yr old PC is way faster and more stable without Aero. I didn't realise what a drain on resources it was.
dr_andus:
So it sounds like one should be wary of updating to IE10/11 as well...
-tomos (March 14, 2014, 08:19 AM)
--- End quote ---
Actually I'm not having the same problem with IE11 in terms of font blurriness, though at times some fonts do get rendered in more ugly form than on FF, but it's just an aesthetic problem. My biggest gripe about IE10/11 vs. IE9 was that the Outlook web interface got deprecated, e.g. it's no longer possible to sort emails by the name of a particular sender, it just sorts all senders in A-Z and then you need to navigate through pages to get to the right letter (unless I'm missing something).
Vurbal:
...but I'd rather stick with Office 2010 than switch full Aero back on.
_____________________
-dr_andus (March 13, 2014, 09:26 AM)
--- End quote ---
Why? :tellme:
-IainB (March 14, 2014, 05:55 AM)
--- End quote ---
Because, as I've discovered after switching it off, my 3-yr old PC is way faster and more stable without Aero. I didn't realise what a drain on resources it was.
-dr_andus (March 14, 2014, 08:28 AM)
--- End quote ---
That was the biggest eye opener for me when I tried out Windows 8. I already didn't use Aero but in Win8 it's not optional any more. Having a 4 year old computer with onboard ATI graphics pretty much guarantees my video driver is going to suck which, not surprisingly, it does. I didn't realize how catastrophic that could be until I tried out Win8 which forces you to use Aero's window manager.
I had to track down the reason for explorer.exe intermittently restarting (not crashing - restarting) and programs routinely hanging for anywhere from seconds to over a minute. In the end it all turned out to be DWM.exe causing the problems. Explorer would restart after not getting a response for a certain amount of time from DWM. Likewise, when the Windows Task Manager told me some other program was hanging, if I checked in System Explorer it told me it was actual DWM. Once again, restart DWM.exe and the problem was solved.
IainB:
RolandOH replied on
The cause for Office, Modern UI and IE10 to look so bad is that they use a new graphics rendering API offered in Windows 8 (and with updates on Windows 7, too).
The new font rendering engine offered by this new API simply doesn't have Clear Type implemented. So unless Microsoft patches this new API to support Clear Type, no program using this API will ever be able to do so.
[...]
The bad thing is: no one can help you with the font rendering problem. You're on your own, as a consumer. For me that meant to downgrade back to Office 2010, ignoring Modern UI and all apps completely and ditching IE 10 (but hey, that's a no-brainer, isn't it?).
--- End quote ---
So it sounds like one should be wary of updating to IE10/11 as well...
-tomos (March 14, 2014, 08:19 AM)
--- End quote ---
This seems to be hearsay - or at least a speculative FUD theory. Repeated searches on this seem unable to throw up any actual evidence to suggest definite proof that it defines the causal problem. For example - as mentioned above - how come I can't replicate the problem on my laptop, yet the problem exists on @dr_andus' i7 laptop/PC with a similar (but newer) configuration to mine?
_________________________________
...Because, as I've discovered after switching it off, my 3-yr old PC is way faster and more stable without Aero. I didn't realise what a drain on resources it was.
-dr_andus (March 14, 2014, 08:28 AM)
--- End quote ---
I'm not sure that's a valid point. Your 3-year old PC presumably doesn't have the i7 CPU and GPU configuration of your new laptop/PC either, so the comparison would seem to be chalk and cheese on the technology. Your current setup is a grunt machine and has surplus CPU and GPU cycles coming out of its ears by comparison - never mind the R/W disk throughput performance if you have a 7200rpm hard drive or an SSD. No real bottlenecks. It took me a while and quite a bit of suck-it-and-see empiric method and experimentation to get my head around the implications of this capacity surplus. (Freedom!)
If you switched ON all the animation and Aero - as I eventually did on my laptop, after stupidly trying to conserve everything in sight - and started up IE and the MS Office packages and had them running most of the time, you'd find (like I do) that the CPU utilisation would typically rarely be more than an aggregate of around 12% from all processes - and even that would probably only be an intermittent blip/peak because of some intensive number-crunching or large database-searching, or something has gone wrong - e.g., occasionally, IE starts to do something wrong internally and will knock up 13% when idle, all by itself and for no good reason, so the CPU heats up a bit and the fan speeds up. Restarting IE is the workaround for that.
This is really nothing new. For example, coincidentally, the same point about surplus capacity on modern PCs changing the paradigm was made elsewhere in DCF recently by @Mouser. I guess one is unlikely to need to hoard water if one lives underneath a waterfall.
_________________________________
...I had to track down the reason for explorer.exe intermittently restarting (not crashing - restarting) and programs routinely hanging for anywhere from seconds to over a minute. In the end it all turned out to be DWM.exe causing the problems. Explorer would restart after not getting a response for a certain amount of time from DWM. Likewise, when the Windows Task Manager told me some other program was hanging, if I checked in System Explorer it told me it was actual DWM. Once again, restart DWM.exe and the problem was solved.
-Vurbal (March 14, 2014, 11:14 AM)
--- End quote ---
I'm unsure whether it was the same issue, but I recall reading recently something to the effect that the root cause of a particular crash/hang/restart problem was an inadequate WAIT time interval being set for a service to respond via an I/O bus somewhere. Once you set the WAIT to a longer time interval, the problem went away. The WAIT was specified in the Registry somewhere. Sorry I can't be more specific. I would have made a note of it if it had been relevant to my setup. I shall try and find it and will post it up here if I do.
_________________________________
There's a lot more to go wrong and to get right with the newer technology. For example, I was trying to connect an HDMI cable from my laptop to my digital TV the other day and output audio-video from the laptop to the TV screen. The TV has 3 x HDMI input sockets, all apparently with the same specifications. But it wouldn't work. I read the laptop manual and the TV manual to get it working, and neither was much help. However, once I figured out that the laptop display needed to be set to laptop + screen projector, I got a very blinky video and spasmodic sound out of the TV. It was like the video and audio sync/timing was way off. That was on HDMI 1.
HDMI 2 didn't seem to work at all ("No signal), and HDMI 3 (this was the last one I tried in sequence) worked fine, though the colour didn't seem as nice as the laptop's display.
dr_andus:
This seems to be hearsay - or at least a speculative FUD theory. Repeated searches on this seem unable to throw up any actual evidence to suggest definite proof that it defines the causal problem. For example - as mentioned above - how come I can't replicate the problem on my laptop, yet the problem exists on @dr_andus' i7 laptop/PC with a similar (but newer) configuration to mine?
-IainB (March 15, 2014, 07:57 AM)
--- End quote ---
But that's exactly the point. The problem occurs on some people's systems and not on others. And as for why people speculate about the causes... what other choice do they have if MS, the creator of the software and an organisation with huge resources, is unable to or unwilling to offer an explanation and a solution?
And it looks like people are having this problem not only with MS Word 2013 on Win7 but also with Win8 in general: Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)
Tzon asked on February 24, 2013
Poor font rendering in Windows 8 (blurry text)
Apparently there is a huge problem with font rendering in Windows 8. Text appears very blurry. Programs affected by the new rendering are: Internet Explorer 10, the modern interface (start screen), Office 2013 and other 3rd party applications that rely on this rendering technology. There is no way to fix this problem, unless Microsoft recognizes it.
--- End quote ---
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version