Go-oo
OpenOffice 3 has been out for a while now. I was very eager back in a time to come out of beta development but when it finally came out I was a bit disappointed. True it supports latest Microsoft office format and is kind of a better looking than previous version……but performance is quite slow. I do not know why but it seems there is a tendency in building bulky and resource-hungry applications! Does not we want fast and good-looking software? Maybe all those developers have quad-cores up there and they forget there are people outside still using old computers.
Go-oo is modified version of OpenOffice 3 with performance in mind. Developers claim Go-oo uses less memory, starts up faster, better supports Microsoft binary and processes faster than original version of OpenOffice 3. The best of all is its $0 priced.
I noticed faster import of Microsoft documents and application launch time but I must say I saw some Microsoft office 2007 compatibility bugs which by the way are also in original OpenOffice suite.
Nevertheless for those who do not want to pay for office software it is a nice free alternative to Microsoft which does the job equally well then original OO version, but faster.
compatibility: Windows and Linux
Get oo, Download Here
Hi Thomas, thanks for the great post. I’ve got something to say about performance on the GO-OO. The reason why you experience a slow performance is because the default setting limits the program to use ONLY 20MB of system ram.
You could give it more ram to use to improve performance by follow the steps below:
1. from the menu, click on Tools -> Options
2. on your left column, choose Memory, then on the right, adjust the amount you desired. I let it use 200MB since I got 2GB of ram.
3. change the amount of ram per object to 10% of your ram allowance.
4. Reduce the # of undo steps by half. (I put 25 since I only undo at most 10 steps)
Let me know if this help.
on November 17, 2008
@Nam:
yea this really helps OO is awesome makes me think why people pay soo much for MSO 2007
on November 17, 2008
@Nam: Hi Nam. No, I did not want to say go-oo is slow, but original open office is a bit slow. maybe I wrote it in a dubious way.
Curently I have an annoying bug in go-oo which increases my cpu to 50% and freezes for 3 seconds whenever I start writing a document. After that everything is fine. I need to find out if this is because vista sp2 beta, or because of my hips. I tried your instructions but it did not help. There is definitely some interferance or a bug and not the raw performance issue. But thanks for useful instructions. Great tip.
on November 18, 2008