by Basil Fernie
Screenshots by Embellish 

Some people using StarOffice 5.1 on OS/2 Warp reported that this version is running very slow, with excessicve CPU usage, as you can see in the photo above. This photo shows SO 5.1 running on Warp 4 FP6, Java 1.1.7, Pentium 200, beta-test machine of @Macarlo, Inc. with 96% of CPU usage (Star Edit simply can't open a site where are above three thousand pages in html}. In the same PC StarOffice version 5.0 runs fine, using only 17 per cent of CPU resources, opening quickly the entire @Macarlo, Inc. web site, as you can see in the photo below. All CPU measurement was made by Control Center of Stardockss Object Desktop Professional.

On my Cyrix 300MHz / 64MB / FP9 / J1.1.8 system, the CPU load of SO5.1 is 2-3% when resting in foreground and less than 10% when editing for example a text document. This is about the same as my e-mailer, PRMailer, on which I'm writing this now.

It does jump up a bit every now and again to about 50% for some disk-related activity which shouldn't be automatic backup, I have that switched off. It seems to load DLLs or their equivalent quite often for various purposes but this doesn't take very long. On the whole I find SO5.1 less resource-hungry than Netscape 4.61.

If there's a lot of disk thrashing going on along with the high CPUusage, you might check Tools / Options / General / Save and make sure that you don't have more or less continuous automatic backup, as you can see in the photo below.

Another possible problem could be your RAM headroom - 5.1 was quite a bit bigger than 5.0 and if you have much less than 64MB you could be doing a great deal of cache swapping more or less continually.

One other thought: did you get your SO5.1 from the Star site *before*the Sun takeover, or from the Sun site thereafter? Sun did fiddle things somewhat to generally good effect when they got their hands on StarOffice, and that's the version I'm using. (Strictly speaking, what you could get from the StarDivision site was either SO5.0 or SO5.01, but the latter often got called 5.1...)

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