[ Thanks to Mayank
for this link. ]
“StarOffice is an alternative Office Suite with one very
tantalizing feature — Zero cost! Beyond the price however,
StarOffice is a full-featured suite of programs that offer
compatibility with various file formats and good cross-platform
capability. But, is the latest version worth upgrading to or
installing on your system?”
“The specs of the test machine for StarOffice 5.2 were, Intel
Celeron 500 MHz, 64 Mb SDRAM with a 20 GB Seagate Ultra ATA hard
drive, Matrox Millennium G200 AGP 8 MB, running Mandrake 7.1. The
performance on this machine was quite bad. StarOffice takes a huge
amount of time to load and simply guzzles RAM once it starts up.
More memory would help but why should we need 128MB for Word
Processing. This seems to be largely a problem with StarOffice for
Linux. StarOffice takes about 12 sec’s to load in the Windows
Environment, while under Linux, it takes more than 25 seconds to
load. It also seems to perform better and feels less of a hog on
Windows.”
“StarOffice definitely is a very good office suit, but work
needs to be done to make it less of a resource hog. Good points
with StarOffice 5.2 would be good support for Office 2000 file
formats. Bad points would be the unified desktop that we really
could do without. Eventually it will all depend on the user.
This is definitely worth a try. You certainly can’t argue with the
price — Free!”