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Word Processing Difficulties

S

SaidMohammed

Member
It is said that 1 megabyte can store a small novel in ASCII text format. 5 megabytes can contain the entire works of Shakespeare.

So why is it that I have 128 megabytes of RAM and my computer becomes extremely slow when I try to edit a 100 page article? Granted the 100 page article is not in ASCII format, but it is still nevertheless far less than a megabyte in size.

Why does my computer slow down? Is the 500kb of text too much to squeeze into 128 megabytes of RAM? Is the swap file management of Windows so inefficient that it cannot keep less than 1 megabyte of text resident in the RAM?

Your help would be greatly appreciated. Should I upgrade my RAM? Should I change my word processor (WordPerfect 10)? Should I change my OS? Thank you in advance.
 
It is because when you change any single page in a program like MSWord, it has to calculate the changes that will result in all the other pages.
 
What are your current computer specs, e.g. processor speed, operating system?

My computer sometimes feels slow to me, but usually not while word processing. I use Word 2000, a Pentium 450, 128MB memory, Win98.

I suppose if you are running a bunch of other programs in the background or have a lot of graphics in the document, that could slow things down.

Also, are the programs running off a network? I made them take WinNT off by machine at work because we had a very inefficient network system that made many programs excruciatingly slow. I think we were exceptionally bad though.

Adding more memory is often an excellent choice, but when you are already at 128MB I'm not sure how much more you will gain for word processing tasks. I suspect something else is the main culprit.
 
In this situation a faster CPU would probably help you more than more RAM. Some formatting operations can be very CPU intensive. A smarter word processor that delays formatting and pagination might also help.

Turning off things such as on-the-fly spell/grammar checking may also help speed.

What type of processor are you running. I tried editig a 115 page document in MSWord on a 550 celeron and speed seems fine. Task Manager shows cpu usage of up to 100 percent as I was editing because of the background formatting, but it was still smooth and usable since Word does the formatting in the background. I assume WordPerfect works in a similar manner.
 
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