Be aware of FREE OPEN SOURCE Software!

Its a known fact, the more programs you install the slower XP becomes. It won't destroy your box (though I think at time you're out of your box but will add to the XP slowdown effect. I'll probably give it a go on a spare machine I have floating around.

 

Open office has no e-mail client, and over all is a little more cumbersome to do things in if you are use to OFFice. So if you have Office don't bother with the OpenOffice.

 

Thunderbird to the rescue...

 

If you use Open Office running on Linux size may not be an issue.

I have opened and edited a 135M sql file using it.

 

Installing something doesn't slow anything down unless it's running. The problem is that a lot of software these days, including Office, does install stuff that auto-starts...

Get Startup Control Panel v2.8 (freeware from Mike Lin):

http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml

That allows you to disable (or even delete) any programs that are auto-starting. If disabling it breaks anything, you just click on the checkbox and re-enable it.

 

No it's not a known fact -- see above.

 

I opened the large files in the spreadsheet application. It failed to import the rest of the CSV after ~ 16,000 Rows .

 

Minstrel that looks like a good program, I did download it and installed the file but I can't find the damn icon anywhere to open the program, do I have to restart my computer for it to show up?

 

Yes, You can
* Save as PDF - create pdf documents for distribution
* Save Graphs as .swf (Flash) - provide animated excel charts/graphs
* Save Animated .swf (Flash) - provide animated powerpoint like slides
* more...

 

Thanks SAD, I did not even know that you could produce PDF's with that

 

Sorry for the slow response but I'm still going to have disagree on this one

Generally installing additional software writes to the registry (Microsoft recommends us developers to do that), the larger this gets the longer it takes to find data stored there (hopefully this is not exponential due to indexes).

Microsoft still likes to stick DLLs in folders on the path (system32) which are searched when a dependant file required by an application is needed (taking time)

More stuff that is installed and uninstalled results in fragmentation of the disc again causing a reduction in performance (must admit this is a bit of a petty point).

Generally I have found a clean install of XP is a lot more responsive than a 2 year old one, you can do a lot of cleaning your self but at times it's quicker and easier to fdisk and start again.

I obviously agree with you on the auto startup programs taking resources and causing a slowdown but installing loads of programs will also effect performance.

Have a look at one of Microsofts articles on Restore Your Computer's Performance with Windows XP the first tip on improving performance is to Clear Out Forgotten Programs

 

Look in your XP Control Panel for a new CPL named "Startup".

 

Found it, thanks.

Now it is just a matter of unchecking the programs that you do not want to start up?

 

With today's computers, I really doubt that anyone is going to notice a hit caused by Windows searching for DLLs... it's not like Windows does an inventory everytime a program is opened... it loads those it needs.

Registry bloat is caused more by incomplete uninstalls than by adding new existing prgrams -- use a registry cleaner regularly to avoid this.

As for disk fragmentation, this is far less a problem with NTFS to begin with but even with FAT regular use of defrag eliminates that as a problem. It's also a problem that is created more by opening, editing, creating, and saving files in the apps you use than in the apps themselves.

We can agree to disagree. However, I would still recommend that anyone experiencing a slowdown look to unnecessary files loading at startup or out-of-date drivers as the starting point.

 

Yes. Initially, just uncheck them rather than deleting them -- if something stops working, you can go back, re-check them, and if you right click the item it even gives you the option of starting it now to avoid a reboot.

If after several days (or I usually wait a month or two if Im not sure) you don't notice any ptoblems, delete it.

 

OpenOffice is a great piece of Open Source Software... but...

It does not handle many of the more complex formatting well. It can produce it fine, but frequently viewing someone else's Word Documents ends up with bad formatting. This is a problem for me because every day I'm opening up a 50-100 page document with all kinds of specialized formatting.

I can't train my customers to do things right, so I'm stuck in the MS Office world.

OpenOffice is a little slower, but the difference is negligable on faster machines.

If you are more concerned about whether or not OO docs are viewable in Word, I've never had problems in that regard.