I remember I used to work happily in Wordperfect 6.1 for Windows 3.1, back in the 90's. I had only 8MiB of RAM back then, so it took a few seconds to load. But once it was loaded, it was amazingly fast. Put it this way - I could never outtype the word processor.

Windows 3.1 booted in a few seconds on a high end PC. DOS booted even quicker - under a second. Yeah yeah I know - DOS and Windows 3.1 does not have true memory management, no pre-emptive multitasking, no networking subsystem etc. But then again those PC's were 486DX2-66 MHz machines with 2-8MiB of RAM...

Why am I ranting like this? Because I am frustrated seeing my G4 1GHz 17" PowerBook with 1GiB RAM run into 90% CPU utilization just because I have Microsoft Word 2004 on Mac OS X 10.3.4 open. In specific, I have one document open based on the new Notebook type document. For the rest - I am not touching the notebook. It is just sitting there chewing up 90% of my CPU - doing nothing. After some troubleshooting I found 70% of the problem. I have about 20 entries, each with one of those fancy aquafied icons (checkbox, exclamation mark and question mark) to indicate the kind of entry. That is why those icons are there for, isn't it???

Anyways, removing all those icons, and leaving the notebook to settle caused it to drop to a steady 20% CPU utilization, with Word taking up about 15% of that 20%....

My question to you is - why? Those icons are not animated, and even if they were I am sure a 1GHz computer can render a 10x10 pixel animated GIF without using any significant CPU time. Heck - back in the 80's and 90's people used to have the Assembly '9x competitions where they rendered rotating 3D torusses in a 4KiB COM file running on 386's!

I love my Mac - make no mistake about it. I prefer it to anything else for workstation related work. But why can't Microsoft (and so many other companies) who have more than 20 years of experience behind them in the software industry, write efficient code anymore? It seems there are some people who agree with me on this.

Is it really so difficult for M$ to spend the day or two on Word 2004 for Mac OS X to optimize the idle loops a bit? Because of this, I cannot really use the Notebook thingey since I need the ability to have it open at all times on my desktop - which is clearly not possible without chewing up all my available CPU power...

This is not the first time I got pissed off at this kind of behaviour...