Re: Apple II Celebration (was: Re: FS: APPLE IIGS)

[pubpc1@library.ucla.edu]

spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote,
in response to my reply:
>>Joe, consider AppleWorks GS v1.1, available for $15 from Alltech
>>Electronics (http://www.allelec.com/).  It has a full-featured
>>word processor that supports fonts, multiple rulers, has a wonderful
>>dictionary and thesaurus, handles files of over 100K with ease,
>>and version 1.1 is quite stable.
>                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>    I would tend to disagree when talking about the word-processor
>module. I used to use AppleWorks GS 1.1 heavily back in college a
>few years ago, for writing long term-papers and essays. I can't
>tell you how many times it would lock up or freeze, causing me to
>lose HOURS of work and thought. Another thing it would do, was
>suddenly bring up a dialog box with two options "-->RESTART" and
>"Other Button" (not very pleasant, since it was as good as a lock
>up, but you got a dialog to reboot the computer).

Mitchell, I've seen that "fatal" dialog box many times too.  :)
(You didn't save often enough, did you?)

I don't think it is right to fault AWGS, though.  When given
enough memory (4MB or more) and if there are no conflicting
extensions, AWGS is rock stable.  I hardly ever see that dialog
any more and often, I have the word processing module on for
more than a day at a time.


>    This happened when my system was running with 2 MB of RAM.
>Oh, and my brother had a separate IIgs running with 1.25 MB of
>RAM and it too would constantly freeze-up when running AWGS 1.1
>(I remember my sister borrowing the machine to do some work for
>school and being a little ticked off that the computer had "ate"
>it; she was using AWGS of course). I've seen countless other
>reports about it freezing up in the same way, the program is/was
>very, very buggy. Even to this day it is rather unstable running
>on my 5 MB system with a hardrive. I use AWGS for light work,
>like typing up short letters or printing envelopes (and even
>then have had it freeze).

When running on a hard drive and 4MB-8MB of memory, my experience
has been that the program is rock stable.  It has been stable
since the time I did a "weeding" of extensions that would upset
it.

I have noticed that this program is very sensitive when a Zip
board is being pushed beyond its limits.  AWGS 1.1 was one of
the programs that would crash if I set the Zip running at 13.75MHz
to 64K of cache.  Only when the cache settings were 16K would
it stabilize.  Once it did, however, the program seldom crashed.


>    Actually my favorite word-processor is the built-in editor
>in ProTERM 3.1 (despite it lacking a spell-checker and having
>that annoying 45K limit). That is stable, and much easier and
>nicer to use than AppleWorks Classic. Plus ProTERM follows the
>Apple GUI standard so cutting and pasting, etc is just as it
>would be in GS/OS or on a Mac (right down to key-equivalent
>shortcuts). I really wish I could convince InTrec to expand the
>editor into a full-featured word processor. :)
>
>Mitchell Spector
>spec@vax2.concordia.ca

You may like Roger Wagner Publishing's MouseWrite, then.  It uses
a MouseText interface also and it does have a spelling checker. :)

-Scott G.