Sluggish Office 2013 performance

[Essence_of_War]

My work computer is pretty old, but I've recently been seeing incredibly sluggish performance, especially while scrolling or page-up/down'ing in large office 2013 documents. Especially ones with lots of pictures.

CPU: E8400
Memory: 16 GB
HDD : 500 GB Black (system/applications), 4TB Seagate (storage)
GPU: Nvidia 9500 GT
OS: Win7 Ultimate 64-bit
(Basically a Dell T3400 from early 2008 with upgraded OS, and an added storage drive)

When the sluggishness kicks in I'm seeing spikes in GPU/CPU usage, but RAM and disk access seem to be non-issues. Would switching to a less-terrible GPU fix this, could this be something like really inefficient hardware acceleration for rendering or something?

 

[cabri]

Especially ones with lots of pictures.

Grphics/pictures will take a lot more processing that a regular test document

 

[Kaido]

Try turning off hardware acceleration:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/turn-off-hardware-graphics-acceleration-office-2013

 

[Ketchup]

My first question would be: what has been updated recently?

New drivers, software, hardware, etc?

Seems odd that this would start out of the blue with no other changes.

I will say that I had some issues with Outlook 2013, and that turned out to be my Nvidia display driver.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Seems odd that this would start out of the blue with no other changes.

It could be old, though, and I just wouldn't have noticed it because I typically do all of my document-writing stuff in LaTeX, and I haven't really noticed that kind of sluggishness in PDFs (except for poster size/resolution ones). It's only recently that I started working with large/image-heavy word documents because I started collaborating with someone who doesn't use TeX at all and I'm playing on their home turf.