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Subject:Re: MS Word outpaced by a snail From:Matt Ion <mion -at- DIRECT -dot- CA> Date:Sun, 21 May 1995 06:26:34 EDT
On Fri, 19 May 1995 10:26:49 -0400 you wrote:
>Don't feel bad. I have a Pentium/90 w/ 40M RAM & it does the same thing to
>me & everyone else I have talked to.
[...]
>I have been told (I don't know if it's true) that part of the problem is Word
>only sees part of the memory available. The guy who told me this said that
>Word only recognizes 16M of RAM. I don't see how that could be true -- but
>he is a LAN administrator working the problem with me.
On some systems, the hardware itself limits "visible" RAM to 16MB (some
busmastering controllers will do this, for example).
I think the biggest problem, aside from Word 6.0's many known bugs, is that
Windows is still limited to its 64k resource heap... once you use that up,
it's gone, no matter how much RAM or swap space you throw at it (a friend used
to get "out of memory" errors all the time having both PageMaker and
CorelDraw! open together on a 32MB machine).
The only real solutions are to either switch to another application that makes
better use of the existing limited resources (Microsoft applications are well
known for being pigs anyway), or switch to a system that does away with those
limitations altogether (OS/2 has no such limitations for native applications,
and in situations like the PM/CD one above, each Windows app can be run in a
separate session with its own private set of resources, and up to 512MB of
DMPI memory available).
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