Trevor Smith wrote:
I muddled through for about half a year with FC1 on a PIII 500 with 386meg of ram and an old slow hard drive. Open Office worked but it was slooooooow to open and even the odd save of a file was slow.
I bought a new laptop (AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ at 2.133GHz) with 512meg that has a newer, presumably faster hard drive. When I installed FC1, open office suddenly worked WONDERFULLY. It was fast enough that I didn't even care about startup time. Not as fast as MS Office on WinXP, of course, but fast enough to be called "fast".
Then I upgraded to FC2 and the newer open office that is included with that distribution. Suddenly open office was sloooooow to start up again. :-( I have updated open office and everything else a few times since then but nothing changes.
FC2 + the newest open office seems to be observably slower than FC1 + (some older version of) open office.
start up time now (with newest configuration and versions):
20 seconds (to load the spreadsheet main window) + 4 seconds (to load the actual very plain vanilla spreadsheet I use to keep track of my budget).
This is the kind of slowness I used to see with my PIII 500! Anyone have any ideas why this is so slow, when FC1+older Open office was faster? Is it an OO issue or an FC issue? Or a kernel issue (using kernel-2.6.8-1.521)?
The only thing I can think of is to check your hdparm settings.
Oh, and just because it is a new hard drive in that notebook, don't assume it is faster than your desktop. Notebook hard drives supplied with the factory notebooks are usually notoriously slow. 4500 RPM or so and no cache to speak of.
You CAN get 7200RPM 8Mb cache ones now but I've never seen a notebook come with one as they are more expensive.
Regards, Ed.
