OpenOffice Writer has just done a different funny on me. I exported a PDF to HTML, opened that with Writer, copy/pasted the results into a new Writer doc, then started doing a little hand surgery on the ex-PDF to tidy it up a little.
When I turned a few paragraphs into a table, selected a row, & right-clicked to get a menu to delete it, it went into hyperspace — for 16 minutes, so far.
Now, I know that this version of OpenOffice on this version of Ubuntu does the exact same operation just fine, because I’ve actually done it — even while enODTing a PDF (a different one, but same job, same programs, same steps), the only real difference being the hardware (then a dual Pentium 1.6GHz with 1GB of DDR, now a solo Celeron 566MHz with 256MB of SD-RAM) & of course devices like hard disks or RAM typically don’t send apps into hyperspace when they fail — they tend to stop or crash the whole machine.
The other oops this one does is very slow Font section when changing a Style (maybe 45 minutes to have it appear); but I’ve seen other instances take maybe 15 seconds, so a pause of some sort is at least not unique to this machine. Maybe I just haven’t had enough exposure to see other systems go comatose, but I think it would be fairly noticeable.
Oh, another slowth on this machine, not OOo, is typing into this ’blog <textbox>, which echoes about 1 key a second. Teeeedious! Now all I need to do is make about $400 appear out of thin air so I can replace the mobo, CPU, RAM & case (will need a new PSU for a modern mobo). Of course, if I could do that, I’d be appearing a few thousand other $ for other things, too.
Comments
Some quite nice machines go at auction for a lot less than $400. I recently got myself some HP Celeron 2.4GHz machines with 512M of RAM and a 40G 7200rpm disk for $190 each.