After Two+ Years

[Bnayqyama]

About two years ago I fully switched from MS to OO, after more years of dabbling with the early versions of OO. I have OO 2.3 on my laptop and also use portable versions of OO on a USB flash drive. I have been able to do most of what I did with Word, which included extensive use of styles and templates, applied via keyboard shortcuts.

I am grateful for OO. But I wonder about how much time I waste each day because of its slowness in loading in the MS OS (it is faster in Linux) and -- especially -- its daily crashes.

OO has always crashed for me when I leave text and spreadsheet files open for many hours. When I have kept files open, but have not used them for an hour or more, OO freezes.

I have tried a work around: closing out documents the moment I quit revising, but not quiting the OO application itself. This too is a waste of time.

I want to make OO work for me because I love the idea of OpenSource and eventually want to fully purge from MS. But I am thinking that OO may not be practical for how I actually work, and perhaps I should just submit and go back to MS Off.

[DrewJensen]

You might want to consider using the version of OO.o available form http://go-oo.org it does seem to run faster under Windows then the vanilla OO.o builds, although they are catching up.

As for crashes. I don't know what to say - from what I gather Write files of length with a lot of graphics can be a problem but here again each release seems to be more stable ( with a few notable exceptions ) - 2.3.1 was more stable then 2.3.0 - the version at the go-ooo site is now 2.4.

The version 3.0 code seems to be a step faster yet - so perhaps you should just hold out for that, or even install it along side your current version for a test. ( it is only available as a beta download from the main www.openoffice.org site, not available from the go-oo site )

Having it freeze after being left idle for long periods - I have had that happen a few times - but that has seemed to go away with the latest releases, at least for me. I have to admit though that I do not work with large Write files often, so will look for what others that do have to say.

[TheGurkha]

How big are your documents? I've never yet had a crash or a feeze - that might be tempting fate of course - and the longest document I have worked with is (I just checked) 474 A4 pages.

[Bnayqyama]

It does not seem to matter what size: a document that I have just begun, containing little text, will freeze if I leave it open for hours.

[TheGurkha]

Strange. As for the speed, i find the first time it loads in a day is slow, but subsequent opens are reasonably fast. Of course, the Portable version is very slow. Have you thought about moving to 2.4?

[Bnayqyama]

Since the first suggestion I have installed Go-OO 2.4, but, although it might have opened a few seconds faster, there was no change: it froze with a two page, two column document that I left unattended for a few hours. (I also noticed that, since I did not delete the portable 2.3 from c:/program files, the laptop navigation keys and backspace key did not work. I have seen this before.)

I then decided to try the OO 3 Beta, after deleting/uninstalling the other versions. The program booted significantly faster and, when I left the same the two page document left open all night, it has yet to crash.

If I have more problems, I will try OO 2.4 (portable) before I submit to the evil empire.

[AndrewZ]

Strange. As for the speed, i find the first time it loads in a day is slow, but subsequent opens are reasonably fast. Of course, the Portable version is very slow. Have you thought about moving to 2.4?

That's called a warm start. This effect is quantified in the article "Is OpenOffice.org Getting Faster?"

The version 3.0 code seems to be a step faster yet

This is also quantified in the above article.

I am grateful for OO. But I wonder about how much time I waste each day because of its slowness in loading in the MS OS (it is faster in Linux) and -- especially -- its daily crashes.

That is abnormal. I do weird things to OpenOffice.org and volunteer on the QA project, yet OpenOffice.org rarely crashes. Try Troubleshooting: OpenOffice.org Crashes.

[Hagar Delest]

Do you have any application that could mess the temporary files? In Tools>Options>OOo>Paths, try to create a new dedicated folder for the temporary files in a safe place (like under your My documents directory) and see if that improves the situation.