Have you ever tried OpenOffice.org? OO.o is a multiplatform and open-source office suite. It could replace MS Office someday, not today, due to lacking of some features and its default performance. Current version of OO.o is only suitable for geek because of its highly configurable options. Yes, the problem is its options being too configurable and defaults suck! I have just tried OO.o 2.0.2 for a week without impression according to its very slow response time. For example, I have to wait more than 30 seconds to start Impress.

As I said, this problem occurs because of default configurations are not good enought. In other words, default configurations are optimized for space, memory space. That means OO.o could run with minimum memory requirement. Anyway, I have so many free memory and I want OO.o to use it more. Fortunately, it is highly configurable. I found an article at Linux Journal which suggests to adjust memory consumption as follows.

• Undo
• • Number of steps = 20
• Graphics cache
• • Use for OpenOffice.org = 128 MB
  • Memory per object = 20 MB
  • Remove from memory after = 00:10 hh:mm
• Cache for inserted objects
• • Number of objects = 20

This settings are adjustable in menu Tools -> Options in OpenOffice.org -> Memory. By this settings, I can open an Impress file in 3 seconds. 10 times improvement!

Highly configurable is a good feature but the default value should be generated by physical hardware during installation. Hopefully default settings of OO.o should be improved in next version.

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