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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)
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
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.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
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...
Gekido's Lair
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.
I also have Prefetching turned off and the C:\Windows\Prefetch directory is empty.
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater
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)