Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!xylogics!merk!alliant!linus!gateway.mitre.org!carlson From: carlson@gateway.mitre.org (Bruce Carlson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: window386 && their WORD Message-ID: <100289@linus.UUCP> Date: 6 Mar 90 21:12:24 GMT References: <754@eedsp.eedsp.gatech.edu> <1779@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de> <542@cpqhou.UUCP> <2113@milton.acs.washington.edu> Sender: news@linus.UUCP Reply-To: carlson@gateway.mitre.org (Bruce Carlson) Organization: The Mitre Corporation Lines: 78 In article dsampson@x102a.harris-atd.com (sampson david 58163) writes: >In article <2113@milton.acs.washington.edu> yjkim@milton.acs.washington.edu (Yong Kim) writes: > >> I have tried to use MS WORD 5.0 for Window this afternoon to realize >> that it's working so slow on PS-2 55SX (836SX) with 30 Mbytes. >> What is the problem? Is the problem related to the WINDOW 386? > >I don't think an upgrade is going to improve things for you. As they >add capabilities they may improve the overall execution speed, but >they might also make it slower too. Word for Windows is indicative of I would appreciate hearing any comments/problems that anyone has found with Word for Windows. I bought my upgrade about a week ago and at this point I'm about ready to use the 30 day return option and give it back to Microsoft. My complaints are: It won't run on my PS/2 Model 55SX (80386SX, 2 Mbytes of memory, 30 Mbyte hard disk, IBM mouse, DOS 3.3). It gives me "Word Basic Error 7", then "not enough memory to load the document" (30kbyte document), and "not enough memory to update the display". CHKDSK says that I have about 550k of memory available before loading Windows, which is supposed to be enough to load Windows and WfW. This machine is about as True Blue as you can get, but WfW doesn't work. I have tried calling Microsoft, but haven't been able to get through to the tech support. I did manage to get WfW working on my AST Premium 286 at home and from my limited time with the program I have the following observations. When you read these, keep in mind that I am a rather die-hard Word 5.0 user. If you haven't used Word 5.0 you might not mind that WfW is is so different from previous versions of Word. Hardware requirements: WfW is not fast, but not much worse than most Windows applications. It's much slower than Word 5.0. I needed about 4 Mbytes of disk space for WfW and the runtime Windows. This is a lot of disk space to use just to run a word processor. Display modes: Draft mode is fairly quick, but all formatted characters (bold, underline, etc.) are underlined. This is a step down from previous versions where they were color coded in the draft mode and more or less WYSIWYG in the graphics mode. In the normal mode and the WYSIWYG mode in WfW you have to put up with some very hard to read Windows fonts and WfW can't display 80 characters across the screen. Even if you have normal margins you can't see the whole width of a page at one time. I don't like it that I have to scroll to look at the words near the right margin of my document. Document Summary: Under Word 5.0 you can look at a list of files and look at the summary of each file at the same time. In WfW I have to pick out a file and let it display the file's summary. I may be screwing something up, but so far I can't get WfW to just give me a list of all the files and the summaries at the same time. Keyboard mapping: The keyboard template for WfW has very little in common with Word 5.0. There are up to 5 functions for each function key (key, alt-key, shift-key, control-key, control-shift-key, etc.) and many are different than they were in Word 5.0. It's like learning a new program. Some good points of WfW: - It is extremely easy to do tables. - It could serve as a low-cost DTP package (since it only cost me $150 to upgrade). - There are probably other good points, but I haven't had time to try out all the features. I may decide to keep WfW just to use in the final layout of my documents, since it's cumbersome for routine editing. I can use Word 5.0 to create my drafts and then read them into WfW for the final output. However, I'm still trying to decide if its worth $150 for something that I will probably use very infrequently. Once again, I would appreciate hearing anyone else's opinions on WfW. Maybe there is something I am missing. Bruce Carlson carlson@gateway.mitre.org