[NBLUG/talk] Hello

[Dave Sisley]

Art Hampton wrote:

> What was a reasonably brisk machine now is a slow slug. C'mon!! What 
> the F is going on here? All I do is a little typing, a spreadsheet now 
> and then and surf a bit. What is the advantage of the new and bloated 
> OS? When Unix was invented did they have machines with 256 megabytes 
> of ram? I don't think so...
> ...
> Art


Hey, Art:

Welcome.  I don't have a direct answer to your question, but I'm 
wondering if the group could comment on how OpenOffice is evolving.  
OpenOffice has often been labeled as slow and I wonder if a change in OO 
might be what you're describing, rather than bloat in the OS as a whole.

I use 2 machines:  a Dell (Dimension 2300 with 512 ram) and a laptop 
(IBM g40 ThinkPad, 256 ram), both running Fedora Core 4.  The laptop is 
usually a bit faster than the desktop, but when it comes to starting 
OpenOffice, the laptop takes forever.  It wasn't always so bad, but 
either my switch to FC4 or one of the subsequent OpenOffice upgrades has 
really slowed it down, as far as OO is concerned.

It takes about 3 minutes to open on my laptop, and about 20 seconds on 
my desktop.  I've tried tweaking some of the OO configurations, but it 
hasn't helped.  I know that at one point my laptop was running prelink, 
but I turned that off because it would slow everything down for a couple 
of minutes while it loaded.

Anyone have any tips or info?  Or do we need a Gig of ram to run 
OpenOffice 2?

-dave.