Open Office Slowing Down Laptop.

[shebang]

I did a standard install of Open Office on Mandrake 9.2 and everytime I open up the writer it slows down the entire system. It never freezes but it slows it down. Can someone help me out as to what I am supposed to do to prevent that/...

[pbharris]

hello,
while it is loading or while it is running? if while loading i don't think there is much one can do.

[trickster]

I think that OpenOffice is a memory hog. It may be that the only thing to do is put more ram.

[countach44]

You may also find that you're running stuff you don't want or need to be (BIND, mysql, SAMBA, etc...) lots of those are defaults in most installs, and you may not use them.

[shebang]

thanks..umm

pbharris: it is after it loads...it hogs all my memory up..

i think i will upgrade my memory (RAM)

countach44, how do I know which programs are running in the background..?! THanks!

[countach44]

ps aux
should give you a good idea of what's running, but remember to only kill something when you know what it is and what it does.
Also, there's a good chance that if its running and you didn't start it, it started up with the system, so take it out of the start up.
/etc/rc.d/
for slack..

[Tyr_7BE]

If you're running KDE, take a look at the KDE system guard. If Gnome, check out Gnome System Monitor. These will let you see how much memory is used and how much is free. If you're starting to use your swap partition when OOo is running, you definitely need more memory.

[shebang]

I have about 90% free space on my swap partition when OOo is running but on my physical memory I have about 56% cache and only 1.56 MB Free and on my total memory thingy I have about 84% free space.

[Schotty]

Looking at used memory will be useless to help you out. Linux keeps programs there until it needs to reallocate the memory to a new program. First off check what services are running and slim it down.

You mentioned mandrake, well offhand I cant say what the app is called, but go into the control panel suite and disable shit like yp/nis, nfs (unless you are actually using it to share a nfs share), samba (unless you are using it to talk to windows shares), isdn (unless you are on isdn connection), pcmcia (I think you get the drift by now) and soforth. Read what the serivce does, and if you dont know, dont diable it and ask one of us here (or google it, god forbid ;D ).

That will do alot more to speed your shit up than anything. Next, on something more recent like MDK 9.2, 256MB RAM is ideal, if not more. I had 768 MB SDRAM and am currently at 512 MB DDR400. And it runs real smooth (and ran smooth as well). Linux loves RAM -- but handles it alot better than Windows will. ALthough XP does a decent job. All in all, a properly configured Linux rig will spank the shit out of a well configured Windows XP/2000 system. No questions.

[countach44]

Linux is definately better on older systems.
I ran slack and a certain version of windaz [cough]LH[/cough] on the same laptop (PII 128megs) slack beat the hell out of windaz at loading speed and boot up speed. Also, windaz didn't support my PCMCIA card.