On Jun 26, 5:21 am, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> You know your office suite is bloated when..
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | What's worse is this diagnostic took
> | at least 20 minutes to finish on a nice
> | dual-core with 2GB RAM.
If it was Office 2007 running on Vista, even Microsoft has admitted
that it takes about 4 gigabytes to get decent performance.
> | [...]
On a side note, I have been hearing a lot of complaints from
consultants and clients alike that Office 2003 on XP has also gotten
very slow. It seems that when they receive an office 2007 file, with
the docx, xlsx, or pptx suffix, a little virus embedded by Microsoft
tells the Office 200x user to install a plug-in so that they can read/
edit the OpenXML document.
When the plug-in is installed, MS-Office applications run
substantially slower. People with only 2 gig of RAM have reported
Word start-up times of as long as 8 minutes. Users with 3 gig of RAM,
the maximum recognized by XP, get a little better performance, with a
1-3 minute first document load time.
If someone sends you an OpenXML document, send back a replay telling
them that this format is unacceptable, and ask them to "save as Office
2000" format, which will assure that you can read it with either
Office 2000, Office 2003, or OpenOffice. Also, have them look at the
format of the document after saving it in that format, just to make
sure that formatting wasn't horribly mangled.
Also, if you create documents in OpenOffice, send them both a document
in Office 2000 format AND in Open Document format, and let them know
that they can view the ODF document using OpenOffice and give them the
link for the free download.
> | OpenOffice.org doesn't necessarily have
> | a reptutation for being lean itself,
> | but developers are pushing hard to make
> | OpenOffice.org 3.2 the fastest
> | version yet. Stay tuned for more.
I don't put any stock in "futures" or claims about future products.
On the other hand, OpenOffice 3.0 and 3.1 are not that bad, especially
the second load.
First load, especially on Windows, takes a long time because Windows
tries to fill up or claim as much memory as possible for Microsoft's
application libraries. The libraries are huge and contain the guts of
most of Office as well as many other Microsoft applications you
probably don't even own (visio, project, money) or use (IE, WordPad).
Once the libraries for either application are fully loaded, the
applications are pretty responsive either way.
A key difference between Windows and Linux is that Windows needs to do
regular garbage collection that often causes the system to "hang" or
pause for as long as 30 seconds. Linux on the other hand, uses a
memory allocation scheme that eliminates most of the needs to do as
much garbage collection, making much more effective uses of memory
mapping.
When Linus first started working on Linux, he was fascinated by the
MMU on the 80386, and as a result, made it a key part of his kernel,
it's also one of the key distinctions between UNIX and Linux. The
result is that Linux can make optimal use of whatever memory is
available, and at the same time, can make both large and small blocks
of memory available almost instantly.
|
|
