These days, the majority of people are running on very fast and up-to-date computers where they don’t even need to worry about memory usage and how their computer is running. However, not everyone is lucky enough to run machines like that – some of you may be running on systems that are years old, therefore the amount of memory you have available could be rather low and you could have to manage it well to ensure that you can still use your computer with reasonable performance. In this article, we’re going to be telling you about how you can set memory settings to try and limit the amount of memory the suite uses.
The first thing we want to talk about is where you can find the options we’re talking about in this article. You just need to load it up and then go into Tools –> Options in any of the tools included in the package. You should see a tab called “Memory” here, so make sure you click on it and you’ll see everything that we see and will talk about here. The first option we want to discuss is the number of steps used in the undo function.
If you’ve ever been writing a document and have made a mistake, or have accidentally edited something you shouldn’t have, you may want to reverse your actions. This can be done by going into Edit –> Undo. The application allows you to specify the number of actions that it needs to remember. The default is 100 – which means you should be able to go back as far as 100 edits if you want to, but all of these actions have to be stored in memory which could be a waste. If you want to cut down on your memory usage, you could lower this to something around 20.
The program will also try to store graphics into the cache to try and speeden up how long it takes to render images in your document, but this once again takes up memory. You can select the size of the cache (with the default being 20MB, you could lower this to around 10MB), the amount of memory you want to use per object (again, you could reduce this) as well as the amount of time you want it to store each object into the cache for. This should be around 5 minutes if you want to lower your memory usage.
There’s also another cache which is reserved for all inserted objects into your document. You’re able to specify the number of objects you want to be there at maximum at any one time. Open Office will automatically set this to 20 for you but we think you can really reduce this if you want to. In most situations, you won’t need this to be more than 10 objects so you could try reducing it a lower amount to see what the impact is. By implementing these changes, you should find that memory usage goes down quite a lot.
There’s also another option in the office suite which allows you to load the tools when you first boot your computer up. This depends entirely on how much you use the software package – if you’re a regularly user and use it for many hours a day, this would be a great way of making it load faster and saving you time, whereas if you don’t open it up very often then making it load on system start-up really is a waste of memory and shouldn’t be done. This package gives you the flexibility to choose based on your own circumstances.
In conclusion, by using the options we’ve talked about above you should find that the memory usage on your computer reduces by quite a lot. We must state that it doesn’t use much memory as it is though so you may want to consider looking at your other pieces of software as well to make sure they’re optimized for memory. This suite is built to run on most systems so you should have no problems at all with using it no matter what hardware you currently have. If you don’t have it installed yet, we highly recommend that you go ahead and do it now.
Tags: cache, memory, open office