Smart Notebook 11 stability

[Willith]

Hiya

 

My mum is a primary school teacher. She uses Smart Notebook 11.4 at home on her MacBook Pro. Im not 100% sure what version they use at her school but i assume it is also 11.4 for PC. I have asked her to ask the IT guy at work (she is not very good with computers) but he is often at other schools and often she is so busy she forgets to ask or doesnt get the chance.

 

Anyway, quite often she complains about Smart Notebook or Microsoft Word 2011 (i know, seperate software) crashing.

 

When i go and investigate, the beachball is just spinning and the whole program unresponsive. I have to remind her to save often. For the Word 2011 problem, i have found some .docx documents open under Word 2016 but not Word 2011. I could simply solve this by updating her laptop to 2016. Except i cant do this because Office 2016 will not run on OS 10.9. And i cannot update her to 10.10 or whatever the latest is because Smart Notebook 11.4 will not run on anything later than OS 10.9!!

 

From what i have read on the Smart website, Newer versions of Notebook are subscription based. There is no longer a one-off payment model. I will be stressing to her how important it is to find out what version they have at her school. From what i remember working as the IT guy in a few primary schools, i didn't get many people complaining about Notebook 11.4 but this was on Windows.

 

Not being a teacher, i dont know what the necessities are for the software, and i have suggested to her to use Powerpoint but she says it isnt as suitable (or maybe she just doesnt know??)

 

I havent been able to connect anything to the random crashes she experiences. I know some documents go on for 12 or more slides and do sometimes have at least one picture per slide.

 

Is Notebook 11.4 notoriously bad for Mac??

[JasonNVSD]

Is Notebook 11.4 notoriously bad for Mac??

Yep.

 

We had a lot of problems too. Some of them were related to Flash Player. Some seemed better after upgrading to 11.4, some worse. It was a mess.

 

Then we did a new deployment. New OS X 10.8 image (with all updates), Office 2011 (with all available updates), clean installation of Notebook 11.4. Now things seem to be working great.

 

So my advice would be: stay with 10.8 (running it on anything newer is a hack), stay with Office 2011 (2016 has had some serious stability issues), update Flash Player, and do a clean install of Notebook 11.4 if possible.

[Willith]

Yep.

 

We had a lot of problems too. Some of them were related to Flash Player. Some seemed better after upgrading to 11.4, some worse. It was a mess.

 

Then we did a new deployment. New OS X 10.8 image (with all updates), Office 2011 (with all available updates), clean installation of Notebook 11.4. Now things seem to be working great.

 

So my advice would be: stay with 10.8 (running it on anything newer is a hack), stay with Office 2011 (2016 has had some serious stability issues), update Flash Player, and do a clean install of Notebook 11.4 if possible.

 

Hiya

 

I will take your advice and downgrade (or upgrade should i say) her laptop from 10.9 to 10.8, as long as i dont forsee any major compatibility issues!

 

Thanks

[datar_]

Thought I'd might do a mind dump here with my own personal experience with my own Mac (I always seem to test it on mine as staff will press upgrade and wonder why things don't work )

 

You can run Smart Notebook 11.4 on OSX 10.10, If you have it installed already on 10.9 and you upgrade to 10.10 it still runs.

 

The other method is to install Ruby 1.8 which is not included in OS X 10.10/10.11

 

Info here - Running SMART Notebook 11.4 on OS X Yosemite | Luke Arms

Packaged installed here - Running SMART Notebook 11.4 on OS X Yosemite | Luke Arms

 

You can force Smart 11.4 on OS X 10.11 but most of the UI disappears! It still does work for the most part.

 

I would say the performance issues may be down to Mac itself. My own MacBook Pro (Mid-2012, i7, 8GB) ran terribly when moving from 10.8 Mountain Lion to 10.9 Maverick. Mail ground to a halt and a lot of other programs ran very sluggish to; Yosemite wasn't much of an improvement but doing a clean install of OS X on the Mac would speed things up temporarly (Not to how it was back on 10.8 and Below).

 

I then bought an SSD and it brought it back to life again, the OS started to work as expected and most of the problems with Mail practically disappeared. And when El Capitan come out I saw even more performance (This might have been due to the extra 512MB VRAM they unlocked on the Intel HD 4000.)

 

Other than that, the only other problem I can think of, off the top of my head, would be Smart Ink causing problems as it usually does.