OpenOffice.org Performance

[Tim Writer]

"Hugh Reilly" <hughreilly1-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> writes:

> In my experience, OO is slow to open, but once it's open, it runs just
> fine. So I can forgive the slow opening. And I actually do prefer it to
> Word. It actually let's me do what I want rather than having Bill Gates
> "think for me", which only requires additional mouse-clicks to undo what Bill
> thinks I want.

Agree about the slow to open but not the second part.  I had the "pleasure"
of working on a six or seven page text document in oowriter this w/e.  With
the exception of a small table on the last page, the formatting is trivial,
i.e. numbered and bulleted paragraphs of text.  When working on the page with
the table, deletions (using the backspace key) were painfully slow; it
couldn't keep up with my typing speed, not even close.  This was on a 2 GHz
Celeron with 256MB RAM.  Now, I was working with change recording enabled
(which I hadn't used before) so maybe that was the problem.

Word processing was a great invention but they should have stopped with
simple fixed font word processors like the old WordStar, early versions of
WordPerfect, or even stuff like AppleWorks that I used on my Apple IIe in
1984/85. IMO, WYSIWYG (yeah right) word processors with fancy GUIs are a step
backwards.  They encourage you to spend a great deal of time fussing with
formatting and the results usually bare little or no resemblance to what you
see on the screen anyway.  In 1987, I used AppleWorks on my Apple IIe,
equipped with a 1Mhz processor and 128K of bank switched RAM, to prepare my
Bachelor's thesis, an approximately 80 page document IIRC.  In 1993, I
struggled with a 25 page document using Word for Windows on a then state of
the art 66MHz 486 with 16MB RAM.  And now, I'm having problems with a 7 pager
in OpenOffice on a 2GHz Cerleron with 256MB RAM.  There's something wrong
here.

I'll take Emacs or vi and LaTeX or troff any day.

-- 
tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>                                  starnix inc.
905.771.0017 ext. 225                           thornhill, ontario, canada
http://www.starnix.com              professional linux services & products
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