why do word processors take so long to start up

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How come word processors take so long to start up. I just got NeoOffice because i was so annoyed with how long it took MS office applications to launch. As it stands NeoOffice takes 24 seconds and MS Word takes 30 seconds which is quite ludicrous considering that my computer only takes 36 seconds to start up, what are these applications doing with all this time.
 

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How come word processors take so long to start up. I just got NeoOffice because i was so annoyed with how long it took MS office applications to launch. As it stands NeoOffice takes 24 seconds and MS Word takes 30 seconds which is quite ludicrous considering that my computer only takes 36 seconds to start up, what are these applications doing with all this time.

MS Word is not a universal binary. So if you're running it on an Intel Mac, it will take more time to start due to its need to run under Rosetta emulation.

NeoOffice has always been this way, although it's gotten better in recent versions. Make sure you have the latest (2.1, I believe) it only takes about 10-15 seconds to open for me.

Don't forget about TextEdit. It may not look like much, but it's got plenty of features found in Word Processors and it's pretty darned quick to start. Also, if you've only got 512MB of RAM, you might consider upgrading to 1GB - that should speed just about everything up dramatically.
 
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your right it's quite definately the emulation with MS word as it only takes 10 seconds with my old 1Ghz 768Mb ram eMac. I do use TextEdit when i can but for the most part i need a program that has better fidelity with MS Office as just about everyone else uses it.
 
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you don't say what hardware you are using so this may play a part. I am running Opern Office 2.2 on a windows XP machine, Athlon dual core 3800 and my time is 5secs. I did it 3 times before I saw what was happening. I was watching one of my screen and the came straight on the other screen. Microsoft Word XP does the same.

I hope a Mac expert can think of something for you.
 
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I don't blame Office for loading so slowly because I know why it does so, but I can't figure out why OpenOffice/NeoOffice take so long to load, despite being Universal binaries. I guess this is the one reason why I can't ever use the latter seriously.

Most of the time, I use Pages. I absolutely love it, loads in just a few seconds. Though I've noticed many of my programs loading quicker since I upgraded to 2GB of RAM....
 

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Yeah agreed. Pages loads fast. NeoOffice even on my iMac G5 2.1 Ghz takes a while to load so it's not just on the Intel Macs.

Open Office is slower loading because it also has to load X11 first before it can open, but NeoOffice does not use X11.

There is also AbiWord. It loads real fast. AbiWord opens here in less then 2 seconds!
 
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NeoOffice is a Java app, nes pas? That's bound to have an affect on loading time.
 
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NeoOffice is a Java app, nes pas? That's bound to have an affect on loading time.

Bingo. NeoOffice uses Java (instead of X11 like OpenOffice) and that's a huge performance drain.

On my PowerPC Mac, Word takes <5 seconds to open, and Word is pretty bloated. NeoOffice took upwards of 40 seconds.

I expect that Word 2008 will be faster for Intel Mac users.
 
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so it all boils down to emulation, Java for NeoOffice and Rosetta for MS Office.
 
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Java isn't emulated, it's a Virtual Machine. NeoOffice takes 15 seconds to start on my MacBook C2D.
 
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and the difference is....
 
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...that a virtual machine is not an emulator.
 
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that didnt answer my question at all, what is the actual difference?
 

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that didnt answer my question at all, what is the actual difference?

Under emulation, the CPU has to pretend to be a different CPU translating commands on-the-fly while attempting to run a program. This can be very taxing and adds another degree of overhead.

Under Java, a program is compiled to run on a 'virtual machine' so that it is capable of being run cross-platform - that is - as long as you have an OS that can run a version of Java, any Java program will run on your machine. The developer doesn't have to cater to a specific OS. Again, this adds a layer of complexity and hinders performance to some extent.
 
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Under emulation, the CPU has to pretend to be a different CPU translating commands on-the-fly while attempting to run a program. This can be very taxing and adds another degree of overhead.

Under Java, a program is compiled to run on a 'virtual machine' so that it is capable of being run cross-platform - that is - as long as you have an OS that can run a version of Java, any Java program will run on your machine. The developer doesn't have to cater to a specific OS. Again, this adds a layer of complexity and hinders performance to some extent.

What cwa said. A VM is more efficient than emulation, but does add a layer of slowness.
 
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The JVM is very much an emulator...it's emulating a machine (a hypothetical Java-bytecode-executing machine) that is totally unlike the hardware on which it is actually running.

Contrast this with Parallels or VMWare, which create virtual machines that are essentially a mirror of the real machine on which they're running. Parallels exposes an x86 CPU on a system that already has an x86 CPU.

Compare it with VirtualPC on a PowerPC Mac, another emulator which emulates an x86 CPU on totally different hardware (a PowerPC CPU.) Or Rosetta, which does the opposite.

Basically...an emulator is a special class of virtual machine in which the virtual machine is nothing like the real machine. A plain virtual machine merely replicates and isolates the real machine.
 
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so im right they are both emulated
 
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so im right they are both emulated

To an extent, you are. But Java just isn't considered to be emulation on the same scale as Rosetta or VirtualPC are. I like to think of Java as more of an application layer than a true emulator
 
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To an extent, you are. But Java just isn't considered to be emulation on the same scale as Rosetta or VirtualPC are. I like to think of Java as more of an application layer than a true emulator

True. Java doesn't emulate anything else, it just is. The two are similar, but the difference is important from a technical point of view. Rosetta converts from native (Intel) code to PowerPC, whereas Java goes in the other direction, converting Java (bytecode) to native (Intel) code.
 

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