As some of you will no doubt be aware, StarOffice is based on the OpenOffice suite (although, confusingly, OpenOffice was initially based on an early version of StarOffice). Naturally, there's a number of differences between them, not the least of which is that while OpenOffice is free, you have to fork out for Sun's product.

So what does the asking price pay for here? First, there's the matter of legal protection against intellectual property lawsuits, although most users won't be losing sleep over OpenOffice's lack of cover on that front. More importantly, StarOffice provides official technical support, along with some extra features and content.

When you first fire up the package it all looks pretty much identical to OpenOffice, save for some cosmetic differences. The suite includes a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation program (Impress), database program (Base) and is rounded off with drawing and maths formula generation programs. As with OpenOffice 3.0, this comprehensive bundle now works under OS X, so Mac users can get their fill.

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We've been using Writer instead of Microsoft Word for several years now, and have found it to be a thoroughly reliable writing companion. It has all the paraphernalia you'd expect, from auto-complete and auto-correct functions through to a full spellchecker and thesaurus. There's the facility to edit and export PDFs (with improvements over OpenOffice such as security options), and full compatibility with the majority of file formats. We had no trouble importing various test Microsoft Word documents.

There are some decent new features here, such as improved notes. In OpenOffice, these are simply yellow tags that appear mid-page, whereas StarOffice positions them neatly off to the side, complete with colour coding and date stamp, which looks far more professional. The zoom function is pretty cool; a simple slider in the bottom menu bar allows the user to zoom in or out, enabling those with a large screen (or dual monitors) to pull back and view multiple pages at the same time.

Other small embellishments are scattered throughout the suite. For example, in the spreadsheet program there's a new solver tool which finds the solution to equations with multiple unknown values. StarOffice 9 also includes a number of extra fonts, template documents and clip art.

But is that enough to warrant the price tag over its free sibling? On balance, probably not for us, but your mileage may well vary depending on how much you'll utilise StarOffice's additions to the formula.

StarOffice is without doubt an excellent office suite, but we'd sooner stick with OpenOffice given the fact that it's freeware. However, the choice does depend on whether you can make use of the handy extra bits and bobs StarOffice contains and whether or not you're likely to need formal technical support.