Last Updated on January 21, 2020 by Dave Farquhar
This week the usual sources were flooded with stories about how slow and bloated Openoffice is. I guess this came on the heels of the release of version 2.0; it’s never been much of a secret that Openoffice was big and slow. It’s descended from Staroffice, after all, and it was big and slow too.
Speedup tips ensued.
A tips summary appeared at The Inquirer, but I’ll elaborate on them a bit.
First, fire up one of the apps and go to Tools, Options. Click on Java, then uncheck the box that says Use a Java Runtime Environment. This can speed up loadtime by a factor of 10, and I’m not kidding. On my machine, it used to take 30 seconds for one of the applications to load; now it takes 2-3.
This is an old trick; I remember back in 1996-97 we used to disable Java in Netscape to speed it up considerably. Disabling Javascript used to help too. It’s hard to live without at least Javascript these days, alas. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need a Java-enabled word processor though.
Another tip involved clicking on memory, going to Graphics Cache, and changing the value for Use for Openoffice.org to 64 and Memory per object to 8. I wouldn’t do this on low-memory machines but if you have a lot of RAM it does seem to help.
I used to avoid Openoffice because it was slow. If I wanted to wait 30 seconds for my word processor to load, I’d buy a Commodore 64 and hook a 1541 up to it again. The memory usage still bugs me, but on high-memory machines, I’m finally comfortable using it, and that’s good. It’s very nice to have a free office suite that’s practical to use available.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Thanks, man…