Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!ukc!icdoc!syma!grahamt
From: grahamt@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Graham Thomas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: WordPerfect slowdown
Message-ID: <977@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
Date: 12 May 89 11:38:27 GMT
References: <3274@cs.dal.ca>
Organization: SPRU, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Lines: 42

From article <3274@cs.dal.ca>, by silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert):
> Can anyone shed light on the drastic slowdown that I sometimes get with
> WordPerfect, which WP programmers claim is a TOS problem.  The symptoms
> are an incredible delay, sometimes 5 min. to respond to a single
> keystroke or mouse press.  It can strike any time, and then all you can
> do is take 5 or 10 minutes to save your work and reboot, which usually
> brings the system up OK.  WP says the problem usually happens after the
> machine has been on for a while, but I just had it happen last night
> when I started the system cold.  They claim it happens with other
> software, but I have seen it only with WP.
> 
This kind of problem certainly happens with First Word Plus (who
also claim it's a TOS/GEM problem, but then they would, wouldn't
they?).  The only difference is that the delay doesn't seem to
extend to minutes - it's only seconds.

(However, there's another bug with First Word Plus v3.1x, where
the whole thing just freezes up totally, i.e. no keyboard or
mouse input is accepted.  Maybe it's the same thing, and if I
only had the patience to leave it for 10 minutes control would
return and I could save my work.  As it is, I usually scream
unrepeatable oaths, destroy the room and press the reset button.)

Nobody's ever explained the nature of this bug to me, so I wonder
if anyone at Atari or elsewhere could have a go.  More
importantly, is it something that's likely to have been fixed
with TOS 1.4?

If not, what's the answer?  Are there any fully-featured word
processors for the ST which absolutely don't crash without the
user doing something incredibly stupid?  Microsoft Write is
certainly not the answer; Signum's good but too fancy & slow for
my needs; Protext (UK, non-GEM) can't handle footnotes of more
than one line.  How solid is WordUp these days?

Graham

-- 
Graham Thomas, SPRU, Mantell Building, U of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RF, UK
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