TechSmec.com

OpenOffice is a “Resource Hog”

October 27th, 2005

Here at TechSmec.com we use both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. With the recent arrival of OpenOffice 2 we hoped that the performance of the open source (and free) office suite would improve, but were disappointed to find that it still seems a little slow and resource hungry.

Now we have the proof, courtesy of ZDnet who have run a comparison test of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and the results don’t look good for Bill Gates’ rival.

OpenOffice uses roughly 10 times the resources of Microsoft Office, both in terms of memory usage and CPU time. If you are using the OpenOffice spreadsheet application, Calc, then be prepared for 100 times the CPU usage of Excel. We’d noticed a significant difference in loading times for the same spreadsheet between Calc and Excel and this explains it.

Still, OpenOffice is free and you do get what you pay for. Microsoft’s bloatware image appears to be unjustified, at least in the case of Office.

Entry Filed under: Misc / Humour