Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

The current version of OO is too big on old machines to use. It usually takes more than 10 seconds to start up.

Most of the time we just use it to type some word in a doc, or just make a little modification. We don't need the all functions of OO all the time.

The OO team may make a simplified version, or just give a shortcut, which can make the OO start up only with the core functions at the booting time. In this way can we save our time.

In China, a company called kingsoft carried out a office suite "wps office", its personal version is small and fast, but with the most useful functions. Maybe the OO team can get some exp in this software.

P.S:
OO has a quick start function, which start backgroud when the OS is booting. In my opinion this is not a good idea.

If all you use OOo for is word processing, you might look at AbiWord (http://www.abiword.com) as an alternative. It is a much smaller download and install than OpenOffice.org, and takes a lot fewer system resources. It isn't as powerful as OpenOffice.org Writer, but it can handle most common word processing tasks.

Reducing the start-up time of OOo is one of the development team's goals, but they will not be doing any cut down version in the next few years. If you need such a minimal package then as Corfy suggests there are alternatives available which are more suited to this requirement.

A start-up time of 10 seconds is not of itself a good reason for rejecting the software. If you want a word processor which is light on its feet, simpler to use and more flexible in terms of styles, I suggest kWord, part of the kOffice suite. It should be even better when version 2.0 is released.