Re: more power, more speed

[Anne Casey <anne -at- ERM -dot- OZ -dot- AU>]

Hey, equipment horror stories! Something I can relate to!

* my last contract, they expected me to write graphics-intensive
  documents on an old clunker with a tiny screen. I timed access to
  one of these images (using Word 6),  a minor change and return
  to the document - half an hour. Apart from the frustration factor,
  your time=their money.

* another place that shall be nameless expected me to write a
  1500 page Frame document (screen dump on most pages), and gave me
  an X-term hanging off a Sun with about 4 meg of memory. Every
  time I did anything exotic, I crashed the compile job running
  on the Sun. It took me two days to run the index and ToC -
  when the guy who had the machine with the most grunt in the place
  let me use it for half an hour. None of the other machines (perfectly
  adequate for the programmers) would do the job.

* at home, I use a Pentium 90, half gig hard disk, 17 inch monitor,
  and 16 meg of ram. This is reasonable for DTP, but I will upgrade
  if I do more stuff at home.

I'd time a cpu intensive task on both machines, and tell them that
you can't do documentation with a 15 inch monitor - you need to see
the full A4 page, at a readable resolution. Figure out how many
hours/printouts you waste with your current configuration - bean
counters love that sort of stuff.

Good luck!



Anne Casey
Technical Writer,
Earth Resource Mapping


ps - I went permanent here because they gave me a Sun with 24 meg of
memory (it's getting an upgrade soon), two 19 inch monitors (one hi-res
monochrome), and the latest version of Frame (when it arrives in Australia).
I'm fed up with sites expecting miracles on lousy hardware/software, and
blaming me when it can't be done.