Performance of OpenOffice.org and MS Office 656
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."
Blooooaaaaat (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Blooooaaaaat (Score:3, Interesting)
Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Useless (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Useless (Score:3, Informative)
He said he turned off the preloading. MS likes to do that to make Office seem faster, at the expense of slowing boot times and permanently occupying a slab of RAM. But if that's all you use all day, maybe you want that.
Re:Blooooaaaaat (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Blooooaaaaat (Score:3, Informative)
the results are in (Score:2)
Re:the results are in (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:the results are in (Score:3, Informative)
I've found it better than MS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the results are in (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the results are in (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? I've *NEVER* seen a case where a later version of Word couldn't open an older version of Word's documents identically to the original.
Then you've never had a Word document with tables or macros in it. My guess is that it is done deliberately to force all users in a company to upgrade. I could cut MS some slack if it were just that an older version couldn't open a doc from a newer version, but it fails both ways.
Re:the results are in (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll bet if you ran the exact same version of Word in Win95 you'd have seen the same results.
So much for objectivity... (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
Nice that the author is admitting his bias up front...makes the obvious skewing in the rest of this 'test' marginally easier to swallow.
I'd love to see a good, objective comparison of M$ Office and Open Office...too bad this article ain't it.
Re:So much for objectivity... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is, actually. I wish the MSM people were requiered to do the same. What's the problem with him admitting bias up front? Would he be a "better person" if he hid his bias, pretended it did not exist?
makes the obvious skewing in the rest of this 'test' marginally easier to swallow.
What obvious skewing? Are you just trying to poison the well [fallacyfiles.org] or do you have any actual counter-argument to the results of his tests?
Re:So much for objectivity... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you saying that everyone that hasn't had the same experience with MS Office installer than you is a liar? That's pretty rich. Considering how complex piece of software it is, it's entirely possible that it does sometimes require reboot, but not always.
OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 Downloads Updated 2004-12
1.1.x releases are minor bugfix updates, you don't count office as ha
Re:So much for objectivity... (Score:3, Insightful)
An uncle giving you something means it's a gift, not a sale.
Also, if you had the impression that there was no difference between the two products, it would change that too. OpenOffice.org would appear to be the same as Word, but because OO.o is free, it MUST be worse...
Faster, yes... not necessarily better... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Faster, yes... not necessarily better... (Score:5, Informative)
export, not import (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OpenOffice and PDF (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Faster, yes... not necessarily better... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Faster, yes... not necessarily better... (Score:3, Interesting)
I usually export to pdf from OO.org. It seems to do that pretty flawlessly. Of course, that poses its own challenges if you're emailing a professor, depending on how savvy they are.
Re:Faster, yes... not necessarily better... (Score:4, Informative)
-Jay
Re:Faster, yes... not necessarily better... (Score:3, Insightful)
RTF will not retain complex formatting such as table information, graphic alignment and pagination or macros...
Obviously macros aren't a huge deal for most people... but export to PDF seems like a good option... (as long as you don't need to edit)
It's behaviour compatibility over file formats (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm convinced that the biggest problem is that full compatibility goes well beyond file formats. It's also about application behaviour, for which there aren't any documented standards. We've gotten to the point where the file formats are understood, but behaviour compatibility is still incredibly tricky.
I use OpenOffice as much as possible these days, albeit mostly for word processing. Personally I've encountered a few less annoyances with OpenOffice, particularly with things like moderate table manipulation. Unless forced to, though, I still won't trust OpenOffice to save to .doc correctly without checking it... at least not with anything important.
In particular, I've noticed that at least some of the incompatibilities are semantic differences in the object model. I'm not sure how they can be fixed in 100% of cases.
One example that comes to mind is with paragraph spacing in tables. If a paragraph is empty, OpenOffice still includes the paragraph spacing, causing the table row height to be slightly higher. MS Word, on the other hand, ignores the paragraph spacing unless there's actually text in the paragraph.
The MS Word behaviour seems like a bug, or just another one of the little annoyances that I referred to before, but it's one that everyone in Word is used to. If you use OpenOffice.org to open an MS Word file that has tables, empty paragraphs in some of the cells, and paragraph spacing specified on those paragraphs, there's a very likely possibility that the pages won't line up.
Some people might think that the OpenOffice import filter could simply recognise that it's an MS Word file, and turn off paragraph spacing on the import -- causing the table cells to be the same height. It's not that simple, though, because if somebody decides to type in the document and send it back, it'll be messed up all over again.
The only way that OpenOffice.org can be truly compatible with MS Word is to keep track of whether the opened document was a Word document. Then it would need to either:
Personally I'd hate the second option. I've come to like the OpenOffice.org document model a lot more, simply because it seems more predictible and consistent, and doesn't have a lot of little annoyances that the MS Word model has, at least in the ways that I use it. It'd also mess up a whole lot of older OpenOffice documents that I have lying around if they suddenly opened with a different policy on things like paragraph spacing.
The first option seems very complicated, though. It's asking OpenOffice to not just simulate the document formats, but also the behaviour of another proprietary application. It's also asking the user to keep track of all the possible different ways that OpenOffice.org might act at any given time. That in itself could turn into a UI nightmare, because suddenly the user interface of the application is much less consistent. (Keep in mind that we're talking about regular users, here. It's not like Mozilla quirks mode, where the main people dealing with the differences are web developers.)
I don't know exactly what the best way is to fix this, but it's definitely not as easy as just writing decent import and export filters. Personally I'm just fortunate enough that I don't have to share my documents very often. When I do give someone a Word-format document, though, I make a point to at least check it in Word whenever possible before handing it over.
OMG! (Score:2, Funny)
This is a first, no information about the results or specifics were put in the post! We'll probably still have idiots who make posts without actually reading it though.
I did read TFA by the way and found the results to be the opposite of my experiences. I know what that means though, you'll understand if you RTFA! Muahahahahaha!
a suspicious definition of "slow" (Score:5, Funny)
My computer is slow (a 2.2 GHz Celeron with 512 MB RAM)
By that definition, my 500 MHz laptop positively crawls.
Re:a suspicious definition of "slow" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing how performance of computers works. IIRC, Electric Pencil on a TRS-80 in ca. 1980 only took a few seconds to load. Now, 25 years later, people think it's normal to wait 31 seconds, on a CPU that's 1000 times faster?
Re:a suspicious definition of "slow" (Score:4, Informative)
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
Re:a suspicious definition of "slow" (Score:5, Interesting)
As has been pointed out by others word doesn't open anywhere near that slow. The author's either lying or a moron who's machine is borked up beyond belief.
It amazes that when people here go out of their way to criticize MS products they are basically saying, "I'm a total idiot that can't use a computer". MS has products that totally suck for joe-blow that doesn't know crap. But a power user can and *should* be keeping windows (since 2000 anyways) clean and stable. If you're not, you're a moron. Should MS make it easier to do so and better? Hell yes. But it doesn't take rocket science to keep it up and clean. People that apparently can admin linux boxes in 31 different flavors are too fucking stupid too keep windows up. Or they're lying.
I think I'll safely say the later is the correct choice.
Windows/Word has enough issues, we don't need to resort to FUD and lies though.
Writer uses zip'ed xml (Score:2, Informative)
This is on Windows? (Score:2, Interesting)
This sounds wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
I just rebooted my machine and Word 2000 opened in less than 2 seconds. Oh yea, I'm currently ripping a DVD. My machine is faster than the one tested, but not 15 times faster.
I don't know how the testing is done, but all the quoted speeds seem way, way too high for both apps.
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
His machine is obviously riddled with spyware.
In my experience, OO always has taken a bit longer to open on any machine, however - when opening the App by double clicking a file, OO always seemed ready to edit sooner than the MS variants.
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:3, Informative)
Its more likely because openoffice was freshly installed, but ms-office was "installed more than a year ago".
If he doesnt even do a clean install, he surely doesnt defrag his HD...
But even with no autoloader and a fragmented hd it shouldnt take that long, so i guess he just had his whole spyware|utility stuff running in the background.
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
So, we hve a review by someone with an announced bias and a b0rked system. Yup, that's definitely "stuff that matters"...
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Dell Inspiron 8500
Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
512 MB RAM
I did a completely clean install of Windows XP SP2 last weekend, and I spend most of my time in Linux, so I haven't really touched it. I installed OO.o 1.1.14 and Office 2003 Professional. Office and Windows are fully patched.
Services running at Windows startup:
Automatic Updates
COM+ Event System
Cryptographic Services
DCOM Server Process Launcher
DHCP Client
DNS Client
Event Log
Help and Support
HID Input Support
Logical Disk Manager
Network Connections
Network Location Awareness (NLA)
Plug and Play
Print Spooler
Protected Storage
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Security Accounts Manager
Shell Hardware Detection
System Event Notification
System Restore Service
Windows Audio
Windows Installer
Windows Management Instrumentation
Windows User Mode Driver Framework
Wireless Zero Configuration
Processes running at Windows startup:
crss.exe
EM_EXEC.EXE
explorer.exe
ls
mmc.exe
msiexec.exe
Panorama.exe
servi
smss.exe
spollsv.exe
svchost.exe (x5)
System
taskmgr.exe
TransText.exe
wdfmgr.
winlogon.exe
wuauclt.exe
Notice that neither Microsof Office or OO.o have their "quick launch" programs running.
Word 2003 starts up for me in 3.5 seconds after a fresh reboot.
OO.o Writer 1.1.14 starts up at 16 seconds after a fresh reboot.
Subsequent starts of the programs with components still in RAM have an immaterial time difference.
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft disagree with you (Score:5, Informative)
There has never been a utility to keep Office in ram
I [microsoft.com] call [microsoft.com] BS [microsoft.com].
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.
Re:Microsoft disagree with you (Score:5, Informative)
OSA loads COM and OLE DLL's into memory. These are DLL's provided by *WINDOWS*, not office. It did, once upon a time, help Office start faster because (in the Win9x and earlier days) OLE took forever to load. This hasn't been true since at least Windows 2000, and OSA is essentially useless and just wastes resources with no benefit.
In fact, Office 2003 no longer loads OSA on startup because of this. (The article is using Office 2003, btw).
Don't believe me? Try it yourself on an Office 2000 or XP installation. Do your benchmarks and then Remove the OSA shortcut from startup a test again, you won't see any meaningful differences that can't be accounted for by margin for error.
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
openoffice also plugs a little "office starter" in the autostart list, so its just fair.
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This sounds wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Dell's 'Business' machines aren't made to be highly efficient. They are made to be highly reliable.
Blank Document (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blank Document (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Blank Document (Score:3)
"Also, OOO will strip Word's undo history when importing which also tends to cut down on the file size."
Re:Blank Document (Score:5, Interesting)
It was, no joke, 180mb
I got it home and opened in OOo writer (I was right, KOffice didn't get everything correct, so I thought I'd use that as a conversion step). I verified everything had imported correctly, added a few more graphs and things (finishing it off) and saved as rtf.
1.2mb. Over two orders of magnitude smaller.
The document is here if anyone wants to try and duplicate the result.
Old Office #1 (Score:2)
Haha (Score:5, Funny)
Nope, it's just the same as the warez version. That's the whole point of warez!
Re:Haha (Score:5, Insightful)
-enters in some fake product key automatically
-has numerous addins included for optional install
-circumvents necessary phone call to Microsoft to ask permission to install
-untraceable product key with thousands of users for excellent anonymity
sad but true..
I gave up on TFA.... (Score:4, Funny)
... since I paid for it, it must be better ... (Score:2)
Fast typer... (Score:2)
Microsoft: Bloat Versus Speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft currently is facing a problem with Microsoft Office. It has reached market saturation in the developed markets like the USA. The package already has all the functions that most people need, and there is no need to buy an upgrade.
Worse, OpenOffice, even with its reduced functionality, has all the functions that most people need, and there is no need to buy Microsoft Office.
Unless Microsoft can venture into new products for new markets, Microsoft will soon notice a rapid shrinking of its revenue. Of course, Microsoft management is not sitting still. Notice the billions of dollars being poured into Microsoft Labs, and the entry into the game box market. Microsoft management is smart -- if unethical.
Re:Microsoft: Bloat Versus Speed (Score:3, Informative)
Most people use a pirated copy of Microsoft Office because it is free, or an older version because it came "free" with their computer. OpenOffice is still a minority program.
If OpenOffice really does have fewer bugs, it is for different reasons.
Re:Microsoft: Bloat Versus Speed (Score:3, Insightful)
I call BS. Openoffice.org is even worse than MSO at getting things to render correctly, and I've definitely have OO.o crash more times on me than word has. Not to mention..."more people use it"? Far more people use microsoft office than use OO.o.
Re:Microsoft: Bloat Versus Speed (Score:5, Insightful)
I suggest you ask 100 randomly chosen people if they know Word/MS-Office. Then ask them if they know Writer/OpenOffice. I think you'll be surprised.
OpenOffice is a great piece of software (I am especially impressed with the new 2.0 beta; truly a great leap forward compared to 1.1), but hardly anyone who's not using linux/bsd/solaris/etc. even knows of its existance. Nor will they even care when somebody mentions it to them as long as places like Dell preinstall copies of Word on every consumer pc they sell.
Worthless ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, so this isn't even a comparison on a clean formatted disk, but one that has had bloat crap build up on the computer over a year?
The dude says Microsoft Office, but isn't that a suite of tools? Will the program run slower and faster depending on how many were installed in the bundle? I don't know, but knowing how to take screen shots and knowing about CTRL-Alt-Del to look at processor usage time is pretty amateur. Let's see some statistical comparisons that are actually meaningful.
Re:Worthless ... (Score:3)
Yeah? Let's see it from a professional. Why don't you do it? Do you not realize that he is stating his personal opinion based on his personal experience, did you get the impression this was claimed to be an impartial academic study?
Re:Worthless ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If he doesnt bother to do a fresh install of the office suit, he shouldnt do benchmarking. even if its not "professional". What he does is an insult to every amateur.
Wow (Score:3, Funny)
Debian releases a new stable version.
OpenOffice.org is "fast".
So does anyone know any good "hell freezes over" jokes?
I tried comparing a cat to a dog... (Score:5, Funny)
First, I chained the dog using a 5 foot leash. I then spent the next hour trying to get the cat into a leash. Then I tested "fetch" by throwing a stick 10 feet away. Funny, neither cat nor dog returned with the stick.
I'll post the rest of my results later.
Yes, but... (Score:2)
First startup speed (Score:2, Informative)
I don't get how that is because of Windows. In any O/S, the first load of any app would be slower if the app wasn't loaded into memory beforehand, if it wasn't preloaded in some manner, or if it was loaded before but is no longer in the O/S's disk cache.
Results (Score:2, Insightful)
and on all of them MS Office starts way faster than OO.org.
I love OO.org, but these "benchmarks" are simply fake or guys MS Office install is broken in some way.
Gnome Office (Score:2)
Broken computer? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, the objectivity of the article astounds me:
"It has been over a year since I installed MS Office, but I know it had to be restarted and that it takes up 450MB (according to Windows)."
So why even mention the install time of OO.org if you're not going to bother measuring the install time of MS office?
Between the highl
Check your computer... (Score:3, Insightful)
On a Mac ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I will say that Word opens nearly instantly on this platform. It's up in about a second -- perhaps a bit less -- and feels lighter than most of the "minimalist" word processor alternatives I've tried.
My Windows box isn't as muscular as the Mac, but I can't imagine it takes much longer to open Word there. A couple or three seconds, tops.
No doubt that MS Office is bloatware. My Office folder is 486 MB. Outrageous.
But I gotta wonder what is wrong with the reviewer's test computers.
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, did he make sure that both programs were set to have the same background tasks running (like repagination, automatic spellcheck, automatic hyphenation, etc.)? In one of his tests Word takes a lot longer on a long text file because it's running various automatic tasks on it. Were those tasks run by OO.o as well? I'm pretty sure that all are available, but it may be that some are turned off by default, while with Word it seems that most everything is turned on by default.
I know that when I worked at a Co. that standardized on MS Office, when I got a new PC or they upgraded my version of MS Office, the first thing I had to do was go in and turn off a lot of automatic tasks.
Now that I'm self-employed, I use OO.o. Do I believe it's better than Word? No. Each of them does things the other doesn't and does some things better or worse than the other. Which one is best depends on what your needs are. Right now, my needs are such that OO.o meets them, and it's free.
Office for OS X (Score:3, Informative)
Install
Drag + Drop the folder to "Applications". Takes up 525 MB. Takes only a few minutes + 0 reboots. Everything is standalone. The way it should be! Only comes with writer/excel/ppt/entourage/msn messenger for mac. None of that "office toolbar" or other crap. Plays nicely with the system
Cold boot: On my G4 ibook (with its magical 133 fsb) takes about 2 to 4 seconds (4 seconds after fresh reboot,
Opening and closing large documents. 6mB txt file opens instantly. Copying and pasting all that data took some time (didn't measure but it was slow) Saving a new
The coolest part of all is the free floating transparent toolbars and toolboxes. I'm also more fond of the user interface. I think its clean, generally well laid out. Obviously microsoft has it in them to play nice and put out a great product. I must admit i prefer to use latex for engineering lab reports. (texshop is a great app for os x)
poor review... (Score:3, Insightful)
Notepad (Score:3, Funny)
And notepad is even faster. What's his point?
OO.o vs Office XP (Score:5, Funny)
Wonderful article (Score:3, Insightful)
But, that may be just me.
This article is beyond pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
First, he doesn't really know how to measure the amount of memory a program is using. He combines virtual memory and In process memory, but they can't be combined. Virtual memory is a closer approximation to the total memory being used. In memory memory is just the part of Virtual memory that is current in memory (it's sitll in virtual memory even if it's in real memory).
He uses the size of the installation on disk as some kind of indicator about how "bloated" the application is. This ignores the fact that Office comes with a great deal of clip-art, templates, and other non-application files. The actual amount of diskspace used by the application code for Office on my machine is 298 MB, but that includes the full office suite (including programs that have no equivelent in OOo such as InfoPath, Access and OneNote).
I liked this quote:
"The first thing I did was to install OO.o It took only 7.5 minutes and took up 164MB (94.82 according to Windows)."
94.82? WTF? Did he mean 194.82? Even that seems a bit large.
He gives lots of indications that his system is borked. His comment about normal.dot is a sure sign that something is wrong.
22 minutes to load a 4.9MB text file? That's completely outside the range of believable.
A bit offtopic, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Premitted that I use Windows and MS Office only at work, and that I'm there only from three months (so I don't know much of Word) a funny thing happened to me, and I would like to know who is the genius at MS that programmed the new autospellchecking and correction function.
I'm Italian, and hence the dictionary used by default is the Italian one. A pity that, in the official italian (intended as language), there is no word to properly translate to click. People usually use the verb cliccare, which is commonly recognized but, as I said, not considered an italian word. Anyway, my boss had to write down a little administrator manual for a site we designed (our customer ain't exactly a geek, quite the opposite). In this manual, every two line he was like "click here, click there" and so he wrote a paper which contained a fair amount of cliccare.
But Word 2003, without giving anyone some sort of advice (my boss said he hasn't activated the feature, and he ain't a geek himself, so I think this comes activated when you install Office) decided that cliccare was wrong, and corrected it automatically (with absolutely no warnings! Neither a lil flashy icon) with ciccare (in English, to spit).
My boss saved the doc and suddenly mailed them to our customer. I'll let the reader imagine what kind of phone call I received from our customer, who seemed pretty shocked that he had to humiliate his brand new 19'' inch monitor in order to use our site.
So, if uncle Bill reads this (yes, Mr William Gates III, I'm talking with you), I would like to ask him to fire the idiot that added such a function.
Horrible article (Score:5, Interesting)
So, I should then assume you're an idiot? Crappy consumers like you are why companies can get away with charging outrageous prices. Price != Quality.
"It has been over a year since I installed MS Office, but I know it had to be restarted"
I installed MS Office 2003 YESTERDAY on a friends computer. It did not require a restart. You may have had an older version installed or some other application using a resource that the installer needed to replace.
"Opening time in seconds - First run 31.1"
I am assuming first run refers to the first INSTANCE not the first time the application is ever opened...
WHAT?!?! This is Word 2003? Running on a 2.2 GHz machine with 512 ram? You've got to be kidding me. Did you measure this with a sundial? With my AMD64 Mobile throttled to 40% (800mhz) with a gig of ram, I can start Word 2003 in less than a second.
Also, second instances of Word (I don't know about Writer) open and immediately close again. The second instance simply sends a message to the first instance to open another document window or whatever.
"Word takes up more memory total, but Writer uses more in the main process. It is not a big difference."
What the hell is msworks.exe? I don't have it running right now and Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are all open.
I'm really sick of these horrible comparisons that are performed by armatures. He states he hates Microsoft, goes on and on about how OO.o is better, but states he will continue to use Office. If you are going to perform a scientific experiment, please make it scientific. Leave opinion out of it. Show us exact procedures so we can attempt to reproduce your results. etc etc.
Does someone have an article describing proper construction of benchmarks or a guide to proper scientific analysis? We need some sort of rubric before we keep posting this horrible articles.
Something smells fishy (Score:3, Insightful)
The author also says he had planned to compare Word's HTML export with that of Dreamweaver. Of course he'll find that Word's exported HTML is far more bloated than that of Dreamweaver. Word makes no effort to optimise for file size - it's not intended to produce HTML that will be manually edited, and simply tries to preserve print layout as closely as possible, while Dreamweaver goes to great pains to produce tidy code. Apples and oranges!!
Okay (Score:4, Informative)
- 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'.
Start up times, who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
The same people that go on and on about start up times, don't seem to bitch too much (or maybe they do), about modern day games, where one seems to spend most of their time "Loading..." I find some of the best games today almost unusuable because of the loading delays; it really blows the ambiance for me.
Re:We tried working with OO.org (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We tried working with OO.org (Score:2)
Re:We tried working with OO.org (Score:2)
and a few more...
Re:We tried working with OO.org (Score:4, Funny)
Re:We tried working with OO.org (Score:5, Funny)
An employee suggested to me that we hire Contrarian Slashdot Poster to give us feedback on certain products. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it product evaluation. So I decided to let him write us some reports on operating systems/software/technology that might be fine. Besides, he seemed to be posting quite regularly on Slashdot, why not give him a try?
Once we'd got him a desk and a PC, we sat him down to write some product reports. At first it seemed fine, with him producing reports and lots of content.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who found that his reports were basically dupes based on a template and that we weren't getting any value. The final straw came when someone switched on the Clue filter, and we realised we'd been completely hoodwinked by a troll.
Needless to say, I fired the guy, and let's just say that I'm no longer with the organisation.
Re:Garbage. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [microsoft.com].
Seven-year-old computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Get over your 'my linux will run on a 7 year old computer' mentality please.
Whatever does run on donated seven-year-old PCs will win in K-12 education, where buying used hardware lets a district afford better teaching staff, and in the so-called Third World.
Re:Seven-year-old computers (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:31 seconds to open Word on a 2.2 Celeron? (Score:2)
MS Office uses the same style launcher that OO.o and Mozilla like. a small at boot time loader for the main cross section of libraries.
It increases speed a lot but then again it chews up memory as well.
Re:back in my day (Score:2)
It ran programs backwards!?! Sweet!
Re:Slow? (Score:2)
Too slow! Eat them cold. With some of wrapper still on.
(mmmm, chewy mylar...)