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To: pompsander who wrote (65647)	2/9/2001 1:23:51 AM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Re: Faster processors and basic office applications. I was just typing a document for a client in MS Word and noticed all the things going on in the background while I was typing. While I pecked away (and I'm a probably a 40-50 word/minute typist on the straightaways), Word was, in real-time, automatically hypenating my document, checking the spelling of each new word (and automatically correcting some of them), checking the grammar, adjusting the line breaks, adjusting the page breaks (based on widow and orphan control and other options), adjusting the placement of footnotes, adjusting the placement of graphics and frames (and reflowing text around some of them), offering me annoying little helpers when it appeared that I didn't know what I was doing, and keeping track of the time so that it can autosave the entire thing every 10 minutes. When I right clicked on a misspelled word or poorly phrased sentence, suggested options popped up immediately. On a 500Mhz PIII, the machine easily kept up with my typing speed while all this was going on. So while it is true that you probably won't notice a difference in MS Word on 500Mhz PIII or an 800Mhz PIII, I brought up the same document on my 200Mhz Pentium system. Typing at my regular speed, I found that I consistently got ahead of the screen from 5 to 10 characters and that it sometimes took 1/2 to a full second to put those characters on the screen (not a scientific test since other things might be happening in the system, but it could represent the time it's taking to do all of the checks above). At times, I wasn't sure if I'd typed the correct characters and had to actually wait for the program to do its checks before it refreshed the screen to see what I'd typed. Personally, I would have bet ahead of time that this wouldn't have happened with even a 200Mhz Pentium, but it did. I'm not saying that this is some cataclysmic difference. However, I realized that even the basic business applications can have a lot going on in the background that we don't think about. The obvious question then is what else Microsoft and other vendors will put into even the basic business applications that will make them even more useful, but which we won't think about as part of the "basic" business function of typing a letter or entering a value in a spreadsheet. And which will then require an even faster processor to avoid lagging behind the user. Dave