fingolfen,
I type 80-100WPM, and I can only get a 700MHz machine to 10% CPU utilization from simple typing.
The CPU utilization while typing is irrelevant. It is during the editing or formatting of the document, cutting and pasting complex elements when you get the houglass.
I also insert graphics... of course, I've done work with them beforehand in photoshop to make sure they are the right size (both physically and file) to easily import into the document.
You can let Word do a lot of the formatting and resizing for you (Count the time Word spends doing this work against your time spent creating a highly optimized document in Photoshop).
It is not just th act of insertion, but scrolling up and down in the document while you are in the WYSIWYG view.
Any presentation which is going to remain on the screen only needs to be 75 DPI, and very few printers offer the print quality to make more than 150-300DPI a realistic option.
Again, you waste time optimizing your images, while you can let Word do it for you. A lot of graphics can be reused, by just taking the original high quality image and just using it in Word, and let Word do all the work.
As far as the quality of the printers is concerned, I just bought one for the office last week - HP-4550N which seems to be the mainstream color laser these days. The resolution is 600 DPI, the price was $2199. But again, for a quick document, you don't care what much about DPIs, since Word can do all the work for you.
Just out of curiosity, are you using Win 2K as your operating system? What MB are you using to support the ATA-66/100 hard drive???
I am using W2k, Abit BP6, BX chipset, dual celeron 366/550, ATA-66, 384 MB of PC-100 SDRAM running either 66 or 100 MHz (depending on if I am feeling lucky with an overclocked system). I mostly don't, since I occasionally use one old DOS app that brings up CPU utilization to 100% and causes BSOD when the processors are overclocked.
Anyway, my point is not that this system is terribly slow, just the fact that it is precisely in Word, (when I liberally use it's features) that I notice that the CPU is sweating here and there, sort of a contradiction to the new mantra that's coming from Intel, which says that it is not important for a CPU to perform well on current business apps. (Incidently, these happen to be the apps that 90% of users buy their machines to use).
Joe |
