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Performance of OpenOffice.org and MS Office
m85476585 writes "I have used Microsoft Office since I purchased it a year ago. I wrongly assumed that since I paid for it, it must be better, but recently I have noticed that it seems slow, so I decided to try OpenOffice.org to see if it is faster. I compared Writer and Word to see which one is faster and consumes less resources. The results are posted on my website."
I have used Open Office for the last semester (16 weeks for those non-students out there) ... and yes, Open Office is faster than MS Office... however... since Open Office isn't widely used, I wind up exporting to DOC, and the formatting has been screwed up in a couple of situations (often at inconvenient times, like when I need to turn a paper in and I find out in the lab, I learned quickly after the 1st one) ...
In speed and resources, Open Office comes out ahead, but the issues I have stem more from compatability (and exporting, mostly)
It is a good office suiteif you are going to be using it on your system and never sharing your files with, say, a company or professor (who will likely not be using Open Office)
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I recently opened up a Microsoft Word document that a friend sent to me a couple of weeks ago. The original size was 19 kilobytes. I opened up in Open Office Writer, and then doubled the amount of text in it. I then saved it to the same filename (.doc), and the resulting file was only 11 kilobytes, even with DOUBLE the amount of text!
His machine is a 2.2 GHz celeron. What you are quoting is the "minimum system requirements" according to MS, which he included as part of his comparison.
It may very well be true that only an idiot would try to run MS Office with a pentium 233; however, if so then it must also be true that MS thinks its customers are idiots, since that's what they recommend.
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This is exactly what's wrong with the computer industry these days - everyone seems to assume that people are eager to upgrade their machines to the latest and greatest the second that they are released.
Every company i've ever worked for in IT has had less-than bleeding edge machines, often what would be considered 'antique' by computer/software manufactureres - but the truth is that these are the machines that the rest of the world ACTUALLY USES because they are what we have.
If my company could afford bleeding edge computers, sure we'd buy them, but at this point the machines we have are doing perfectly fine for what they are.
With that said, I'm typing this on a 333 Mhz machine with 188 Mb of Ram - and Open Office STILL loads faster than what this guy says in TFA. Not sure what he could have possibly done to slow his machine down so much. In fact I just tried opening Write in the background while I typed this and it still only took like 10 seconds (at most) to open.
Slow? Hell, we don't have a 2.2 Ghz machine in the office even - we just bought a brand-spanking new Dell laptop (our first new computer purchase in a while) and it's only a 2 Ghz machine.
Not sure what planet this author comes from, but the 'rest of the world' is using much slower machines than software and hardware companies seem to realize.
No one I know (even audio/video professionals, etc) has uber-fast machines, and the ones we have do the job we need perfectly fine.
Game companies are the worst for this - they whine about not being able to reach the 'mass market' and then they release games like the new BattleField 2 demo that ONLY runs on WinXP, has a minimum system spec of a 2.2+ Ghz machine, etc...
Hilarious...
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Why does this rumor persist? Office has never loaded any part of itself into memory at startup. Ever.
What you are referring to (and was removed from Office 2003 because it's no longer really useful) was the Office Startup Assistant (OSA). What this did was autoload the *COM* DLL's into memory (these are system DLL's that many applications use, not just Office) to improve startup. These DLL's, back in the Windows 3.1, 95, 98 era took a long time to load, but this isn't the case anymore.
This feature hasn't really effected startup times for at least 5 or 6 years (which is why I always removed it from the startup) because Windows already loads the COM subsystem into memory for other things.
While it's still true that this speeds up office load times, it also speeds up OOo load time because OOo also relies on COM for some things.
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There has never been a utility to keep Office in ram
I call BS.
From Microsoft's own site: "What Are the Advantages of Running the Osa.exe File?" "When you use the Osa.exe file to initialize shared code, the Office XP programs start faster."
Voila - that's why Word loads so fast, and you don't need to take my word for it.
Well, that's overdoing it a little. I have a P4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM that I bought two years ago. It was mid-to-high range then. It's still more than enough for most work, but it's very low-end for gamers.
My times:
MS Word 2003 - 5 seconds OO Writer 1.9.100 - 17 seconds
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AFAIK Open Office can save to PDF, but not open PDFs for editing.
Windows prefetches some data on bootup. The list of what is prefetched is based partially on set settings and partially on learned user behaviour. What processes you have running after bootup don't reflect the prefetching optimizations windows makes. You can get a vague idea of what's being prefetched by browsing to C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch.
I also have Prefetching turned off and the C:\Windows\Prefetch directory is empty.
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Startup times don't matter for word processing programs? I find that hard to believe. If you open and close documents (such as email attachments) all day long, startup times are VERY important.
... possibly he should clean up whatever viruses he's got and try again.
Yes, but unfortunately the startup times in TFA were very far removed from normal experience. 30 seconds to start Word on a 2.2Ghz Celeron with a 5400 RPM HDD?!? I think not! The last version of Word I tested was that provided in Office XP, and that opened in sub 1 second times on my Athlon 1.6Ghz system. There's something botched with this guy's Word installation - he said himself in the write up that he's "recently noticed it seemed slow"
In the Real World (TM) OOo is a dinosaur compared to MS Office. It doesn't worry me - I use LyX for all my work - but it's saddening that OSS can be this bloated.
(Disclaimer: I dislike MS and I've been instrumental in getting my University to promote and provide OOo for students. However, if both MS Office and OOo were OSS and free, there's no way I could ever recommend OOo)
Let's try it with a similar computer:
- MS Office Word 2003
- OOo 1.1.4 Writer with J2RE1.4.1
- Athlon 2600+ 512MB Ram, Windows XP SP2, no other software running.
Each block of tests was proceeded by a reboot
Word:
4.5 seconds
1.5 seconds
0.8 seconds
0.8 seconds
OOo Writer w/quickstart enabled:
5.5 seconds
1.0 seconds
0.8 seconds
0.8 seconds
OOo Writer w/quickstart disabled:
17 seconds
1.5 seconds
1.5 seconds
1.5 seconds
These figures tell a different story from the article, I would say.
Note: I did have to turn off Macro security in word, otherwise it hung there for several MINUTES performing a 'virus scan'.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I've yet to see a MS Word processor that had MS Word compatbility to function 100% with the documents made in the previous version. So I guess OO.o aint too bad, considering it is definitely an improvement on MS Word.