Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 27th Dec 2012 19:50 UTC
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Member since:
2011-05-19
Actually, Office is now very light on system resources -- principally because its actually resource usage has NOT grown at anywhere near the rate that hardware has improved.
Ten years ago, I might've launched Character Map to grab some symbol that I didn't know how to type. These days, I just launch Word. It's just as fast -- in fact, it's faster, because I've probably got that character on my MRU list in Insert --> Symbol.
The thing you have to remember is that the stated "System requirements" are very different from actual resource consumption.
It may "require" 1 GB of RAM, but that's with the OS loaded. Excel 2013 (x86) uses 18 MB at launch. Word 2013 (x86) uses 25 MB. PowerPoint 2013 (x86) uses 27 MB.
It may "require" 3 GB of disk space fully-loaded, but that's if you install the fully-loaded everything-bundle. Install Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and you'll use around 1 GB. And if you really want, you can delete other components that you don't need.
It does require a 1 GHz CPU -- but probably not because it needs 4x the clock speed. No, it's because they've decided to turn on the SSE2 compiler optimizations. What would be the point of requiring a 233 MHz CPU with SSE2? They don't exist.
The reason that Microsoft Office "requires" more system specs than it actually uses is simple: Because it can. Because PC specs have gotten so good that you'd be very hard-pressed to find one that could not meet the specs. Because it's better to overspecify the requirements than to underspecify. Because it costs more to support someone running a system more ancient than that.
If you install Office 2013 in a Windows 7 VM, turned off most system services, reduced the RAM below 1 GB, and then restricted CPU utilization to, say, 10%, I bet you it'd still run.
Just like running Windows RT on an HTC HD2.
Edited 2012-12-27 23:37 UTC