Proud Of Being Among The Greatest (Part 4)

In the Temple Of Instability

The best way to judge an OS is to valuate applications' stability that run on it. Productivity is not only given by complexity of programs, but how much this program can be effectivley used.

More complex programs are, more is the opportunity they hide errors. More robust is an OS, less are opportunity that these errors can completely hung up the system.

All in all, professional use of a computer is just this: to use a computer to elaborate and create info, trying to avoid having to do things twice, in crytical situations.

For our comparisons, we'll valuate effectively "on the road" a kind of program often used on both Amiga and PC: Word Processor.

Per le nostre analisi, valuteremo effettivamente "su strada" un genere di programmi molto in uso sia su Amiga che nel mondo PC: i Word Processor.

Microsoft Word Per Windows (Version 7)

We just could analyze this software pack, being the most shared and used. Version 7 does not introduces particular news, just handling for names longer than just 8.3 chars (BTW: do you know how Win95 handles long names?) and complete recomplete program compilation for 32Bit (even if I do not know exactly what it means).

One of Word's greatest lack is the loss of memory while it is executing a certain number of operations (for ex. with macros). Personally, I have seen very often Word stopping while it had exausted memory: heavy cut & paste operations can effectively take to a loss of memory... and "optimized" memory handling done by Window, does not help in any way.

One who uses Word to work all day long, is forced to exit Windows several times to allow a complete memory refreshement.

Naturally, this heavily cuts down productivity.

One second consideration should be done about the effective use of a lot of tools that Word has: personally, I do know just a little portion of the real power of the program, because a lot of functions are completely unuseful to me. All these functions, anyway, are inside the program and have a height on the OS itself, and we are forced to buy always better and faster machines with more memory.

In conclusion, I consider Word a good program... a bit too pumped up under options point of view... and lot of these options are simply unuseful. When I had Word 2 for Windows, things were less problems and less system requirements.

Final Writer 4 for Amiga

Final Writer by Softwood, is a word processor small, fast and powerfull. With "small", I do not just intend that its power is less than Word's one, but that it does not require a super machine to work on. Version 4 of FW is very robust, I have never encountered any problem in using it, neither my ARexx script succeded in hanging up the System.

Probably, Final Writer has not all features and function of Microsoft's product, but the essential ones are all there and anyway, with a multitasking environment such as Amiga, it is always possible to load a graphic program to interface with Final Writer, or you can just write a little ARexx program to execute far more complex operations.

So, Final Writer is not a program full of "unuseful things" such Word is, and, on the long term, it is certainly much more flexible, powerful and expandible.

This article just ends here. Just think about all Windows application that do not do neither half of operations possible by Amiga respective programs... but Windows' one just cost ten times more. And, on the other hand, have a look to Word-like applications: so full of features but completely unuseful, if you do not have a very powerful machine and, anyway, so rigid and static in their inexpanibility. On the other hand, there are Amiga programs: simply, small, fast and very powerful and cheap.

As usual, quality is not in the price, or better... quality usually is not with Microsoft products.

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    Written By: Fabio Rotondo      e-mail: fsoft@intercom.it
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