i installed fedora core 3 on a pentium 3 @ 550 mhz( coppermine) , 256 mb sdram, 40 gb hdd. i have swap memory of 256 mb. the probrlem occurs when i use the auto spell check in open office writer. when a word gets underlined in wavy red i right click it to obtain alternatives for the word. at this point the system becomes really slow. i cant do anything anymore. i use super karamba and hence saw that the swap file which usually stays about 1-40 mb got utilized to maximum. i have to restart the system to get out fo this sluggish state. is this an open office bug or do ihaeto change some settings . please do help....

thanxs

You are running out of RAM and OpenOffice is really heavy... way too heavy. I would also believe that you are using a heavy desktop manager as Gnome or KDE right?. And Fedora is also heavy . Basically, you will need to optimize your PC:

1) You processor is a bit old for bloated distributions as Fedora. Either get more RAM or increase your swap partition (you'd really need 512MB swap at least, and one more mem-stick of 256 would be great).

2) Drop Gnome or KDE. Go with something more lightweight as Fluxbox or XFCE.

3) Just use OpenOffice if you really have too. Many peoples just need a simple Word Processor with spell check capabilities. In this case, AbiWord wins hand's down.

4) Other distributions seems to be faster with older machines, as Slackware and Debian. Think about it too .

Good luck!

thanx for the info... yeah i am using kde actually. what surpises me is that everything else works fine . just this open office problem. anyway thanx