I didn't see a mention of this when I googled it, but though I prefer KWord because OpenOffice looks sketchy in KDE, once I've got a couple of paragraphs in to a document KWord seems to slow down - characters appear after a lag. Is this a common thing to find?

My laptop is a 1.6 ghz dual core Toshiba from three years back - 2gb ram, Intel 965gm onboard graphics, and I've upped my hard drive from the original 120gb to a 500gb one.

I'm now using Kubuntu 10.04 (with KDE 4.4.2).

Thanks.

I have heard some people noted this issue before and I've found and fixed several issues which would cause a lot of work to be done by the computer when typing while that was unneeded. Spell checking was a big issue before, for example.

Maybe you can check which version of KWord you are using exactly and tell me. You can find that out in the KWord 'help' menu. There is a 'About KWord' menu entry and in the about dialog it gives the version.

Thanks for trying out KWord