With 6.4.4.2 I’m finding that LO is almost always slow and sluggish when it’s not either “not responding” or just hanging. I’m wondering whether my somewhat out-of-date computer is a problem here. It’s an old Dell Pentium with four gig of RAM and Windows 10 Home Version 2004. If anyone has any idea, what would be the minimal computer power required for a reasonably good experience with LO? I realize that it’s probably the more the better, but I’m not in a position to act on that.
I still have a Pentium III Thinkpad T20 650 MHz 512 MB RAM with an old 32-bit Linux distro, light desktop LXDE or Xfce and 4.x LO. Provided I don’t “exaggerate” with document complexity, it still behaves honourably considering the hardware.
In your case, see if there are background tasks pumping too much CPU power, and sure there are since M$ software always tries to phone home. You may also have an anti-virus of some sort. I remember when my wife installed one on a friend’s advice on her XP T20 (before I switched it to Linux). After that, it was nearly impossible to use the T20 before half an hour, time needed for the anti-virus to scan the disk.
Can this help?
You have tagged “Writer”.
If you are not a frequent writer and are satisfied with simple direct formatting, you can use the app “Wordpad” from M$.
You can find it in the apps under “Windows accessories”.
Depending on how old that system is, I’d say you may have an issue with the hard drive. Errors on the disk cropping up as it is being used, and the drive is dealing with with them, remapping/remapped the bad blocks to unused sections on the disk, could also be just plain wear of the spindle on the drive creating enough wobble of the disk under the heads that the drive needs extra time to try and reread the data. I would see about getting the drive replaced. Other possibilities and an infection of the os, could be a crypto currency miner installed on the system.
Check out some 3rd party disk utilities that can test the disk and see if the issue is there first, before replacing the drive.
One of the most annoying tasks in Wiindows is the Search tools rebuilding the index, specially after a system update. Right-click on the Task-Bar and looking into the Task administrator you can see easily if there is some other program with a high time process consuming.
Thank you AJLittoz and AdmFubar! The problem is solved, though as is only too often the case, not on the lines either I or you anticipated.
Since I spend 90% of my computer time on LO, I thought the problem was in LO. It wasn’t. Had I at the time gone further into the performance of other programs I would have noticed that they were particularly slow as well. At some point after having posted the question above, when everything on the computer stopped dead, I turned on Task Manager and saw what was going on. Desktop Windows Manager was eating up more than fifty percent of my CPU on a regular basis.
I searched Desktop Windows Manager and CPU usage on DuckDuckGo. The official Microsoft responses were entirely useless and a waste of time. Then I found an article on https://win10supports.com/dwm-exe-desktop-window-manager-high-cpu-on-windows-10-fix/. It turns out that the central issue was excessive hardware acceleration. And the solution was to go to Personalization in Settings and de-personalize (reduce resource usage) by the various options offered in personalization. All the steps are clearly set forth in the win10supports.com article.
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