Brand new MBP not keeping up with 5y.o. Gateway

I am a "switcher"
I've just returned from a 2 hour session at the Apple "Genius Bar". They were not able to help me. Hopefully someone here can.
Running complex 2-D PowerPoint 2003 animations on Windows XP, my brand new MacBook Pro is being put to shame by a 5 year old Gateway M675 (which incidentally still has a parallel port and a floppy drive). The animations choke the Mac. The techs at the Apple store tried updating Bootcamp, running the files on their most powerful unit in the store, installing modified drivers, changing driver settings, changing resolutions, and changing PowerPoint settings.

Here are the specs on both:

Macbook Pro
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB GDDR3 SDRAM, Direct X 9.0c
2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 6MB shared L2 cache
2 GB RAM
Windows XP SP3 (Bootcamp)
PowerPoint 2003 SP3

Gateway M675
ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Series AGP, 64MB VRAM
Pentium 4HT
2GB RAM
Windows XP SP3
PowerPoint 2003 SP3

PowerPoint's performance on Vista is also poor so I'm hoping to avoid that. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

its not an apple problem, its a powerpoint problem...

i mean, once you are in boot camp, the macbook pro is just a generic PC. there is nothing "mac" that is preventing powerpoint from running properly. obviously the hardware in your macbook pro is a lot better than that old gateway, so:

i would also update your video card drivers (laptopvideo2go.com)

if that doesn't work, i would reinstall windows, at a minimum. did you set up your boot camp partition as ntfs or fat32?

i might even swipe the whole hard drive, reinstall OSX and Boot Camp.

other than that, try out keynote, which is an OSX application, that, quite frankly, is much better than powerpoint.

 

yep. what he said . it shouldn't be lagging like that.

 

Dude, that Gateway is badass... no wonder it trips up the MBP.

On a more serious note, MasterChef is right. Follow his advice.

 

Thanks so much for your replies!

My partition is NTFS. I will try updating the video card drivers, but that was one of the first things we did at the Apple store, so I'm not really hopeful on that.
I have Keynote on the Mac side. If the entire world switched to Mac-based software tomorrow I'd be more than happy with that as a solution. . . but unfortunately my clients still use PC PowerPoint for the most part.

Could you clarify what installing Windows "at a minimum" is? I bought the builder's version of XP, and have nothing other than MS office and Adobe Reader on it at the moment.

I think it's just a matter of a driver that will enable PowerPoint to take full advantage of the capabilities of this video card. It seems there are a lot of programmers that are working to help the gaming applications perform better. I would be willing to pay someone to do that for PowerPoint!

 

Theres no logical reason why it shouldn't run better on the Mac under Windows.

I do agree with you about not everybody using Mac software. It's even more so in the UK that not many people use a Mac, especially University students. Here, for them if they had a Mac it would complicate things for them rather than simplify, which is kind of the point of why a lot of people like OS X lol.

 

Power point run fine in Mac Office and it also performs well in Bootcamp Vista X64 for me. I have the latest 177.41 drivers for Vista X64. I have no issues with Powerpoint on my MBP.

 

Hmmm. Ok, I'd like to send you a file. I'd be most grateful to those who could test this for me. However, it's 10MB so it can't be posted here.

 

Just curious if you have tried it on Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, plus the latest updates to MS Office...

 

Tried it on a Dell tower running Vista, not the MBP. Equally horrible. OK on an HP DV9000T running XP.

 

Are you using the Powerpoint Viewer application? Or the full Powerpoint application to run the presentation?

 

Full PowerPoint app.

 

This makes no sense if it is only working on certain machines. Did you create it in Powerpoint 2003 or 2007?

It seems to be a problem with Vista, ensure you have SP1, and any driver updates.

Do you have some web space that you could upload it to? I would be willing to test on Windows for you just to put another machine or two into the mix and try to nail down your problem.

If you want me to test please PM me as I don't want to post my personal email address public. I will however tell you my MSN messenger address is funky1471 at hotmail dot com I don't receive emails at that address but have MSN messenger if you would like to send it through that.

Always happy to help.

Dan

 

Many thanks Dan. I'll touch base later today after I sign up w/MSN.
Amy

 

Just a note to anybody else who is trying to help out, I ran the presentation in Powerpoint 2007 last night and it didn't run that well. It's strange that the Macbook Pro doesn't run it though as it has real good specs and plenty of power including one of / the best graphics cards currently available in a laptop!

 

where did you put it? ill take a look at it...

 

I got it from her over MSN. It doesn't seem to be a Spec problem, got to be something else.

 

can you post it online? rapidshare or one of the other file hosting sites?

 

Thanks again everyone! Just a quick note re: PPT 2007. You can create beautiful graphics with it, but as for running a presentation, it doesn't perform as well as 2003. I've been testing everything in 2003, because that's what I intend to run it on.

 

Have you done these sorts of animations before using powerpoint?

Have you ever used flash before? It may be a good thing for you to learn

I'll have another look at the PPT tonight and try it in PowerPoint 2003 instead of 2007!

 

Yes, Flash is probably a much more efficient way to create and run these types of animations! In my environment, I don't always have control over how things get created. I'm sometimes handed things literally seconds before a presenter hits the stage. My computers need to be able to handle anything that gets thrown at them. That's why I try to buy the best available at the time.

 

lol, funny siggy you got, Pixel Chick.

Can you send me the power point prez? or post it on some file sharing medium? I'd like to try it against my (supposedly capable) PC.

 

Can you send me a private message here w/ your email? I'll send a link to an online storage site.

 

I wonder if XP SP3 has something to do with it. didnt they pull SP3 from the automatic updates because of problems? it would be interesting if someone else had a mac running SP3 with powerpoint 2003 that could test it for you.

 

I just finished uninstalling SP3, hopeful that it would help. No difference. Thanks for the suggestion though! I'm thinking I might wipe the partition and start over. Not much to lose at this point.

 

I wouldn't wipe out the partition. It might be that the code that does the animations is not written for performance. Although, you say that on your Gateway machine it runs fine... what are the specs on the Gateway?

Edit: Sorry I didn't get a chance to try the prez on my desktop last night... I'll try it this weekend.

 

i'd say wipe the ENTIRE drive. everything. reinstall osx, do all the updates, install boot camp, install windows xp (ntfs - at least 30GB or so)

that will eliminate any problems with the file system that might have been caused by partitioning your hard drive. it will also remove any problems that windows might have been having in a very brute force way.

boot into windows, install the boot camp software (drivers), install the boot camp UPDATE for your operating system (boot camp 2.1). uninstall the nvidia drivers, do a registry / junk cleanup with ccleaner. install the latest nvidia drivers (177.41) from laptopvideo2go, using the modded inf they provide. do all the windows updates including SP3.

THEN

install office 2003 and all the updates and security patches that go along with it.


after all of that, NOW try running your presentation again.

 

OK. Thanks all! I'll give masterchef's recommendations a try over the weekend and report back.

 

I've gone thru formatting the drive and reinstalling per the recommendations above. Unfortunately the same performance on the animation. Since Friday I've also run it on a Lenovo tower that had an nVidia card. The performance was about the same as the MBP. There has to be some fundamental difference between the ATI and nVidia cards which is causing this . . . but not being an engineer I have no idea what that could be. Thanks to everyone here for trying to help!

 

There are rumors that NVidia's 8600 graphics chips that tend to overheat and thus down-clock to compensate. It's just a rumor, and it's been brought up in the Mac Rumors forum at http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=521163.