I've got a pastor friend who had a very old Logos collection of books. He has continued to upgrade engines along the way, and I think he added at least some of the crossgrades. He is planning on heading to the mission field for a while, so a friend bought him one of the larger packages of L6. He installed it on his 3 year old laptop (Win 7, 4 gigs mem, Celeron processor), which had his old package, updated to version 6. To hear him tell it, it took two weeks for the computer to download everything, and to index them (he says it took the computer a full 3 days). When he was done, the computer was very slow, he believed that Logos would not open (it does, but takes a while) and his hard drive is almost completely full.
This guy has no technical computer knowledge/ability, and he is leaving on his trip in a week, so he called me for help. I've done a few things to clean up the laptop, which gave him a little breathing room. I rebooted the computer, and that sped things up quite a bit over all - He hadn't rebooted the computer since installation, or maybe since indexing (he "never" turns it off, just closes it, putting it to sleep). However, Logos is still EXTREMELY slow. He says that searching is many times slower than it was before this install. He had complained that the program was too slow before this new install, but now he finds it radically slower. I never used his computer before the install, so I can't speak to the reduced speed, but it is slow enough that it would be completely unusable for me, if it was my system.
After looking at his new collection, he liked a few of the new capabilities it gave him, and a couple of the new resources, but HATES the fact that he now had a massive collection of books he will never open, taking up huge space on his hard drive. And, he said he'd never use it if it runs this slowly. He says he has no money available to buy a new laptop or add memory, and is debating deleting Logos from the laptop, and packing a hundred pounds of hard copy books for his trip.
So, after spending some considerable time searching, Google finally got me to the "hiding books" option. Unfortunately, I had seen this feature show up several times while looking, but "hiding books" sounds like the books are still there, but just hidden from view, so I didn't bother looking into it.
It appears that this would allow him to choose what books he wants to remove from his Logos AND FROM HIS HARD DRIVE, after re-indexing. As I understand it, this should free up most of the space that he lost when he installed the new collection, depending on how much he chooses to "hide." However, what I don't know is, if he deletes a thousand or more books from his collection, will this speed up searching considerably? I don't know if the decrease in speed was more due to new features, or just a radically larger set of resources to search through.
I'd like to have a pretty good idea that this will help a lot before encouraging him to do this, because he is almost hostile at the idea of needing to spend the significant time to select all these books for "hiding," and then to have his laptop take what he believes will be a number of days to re-index. He's got presentations to give (some he still has to put together) with that laptop, and a bunch of stuff to do before he leaves next week. I really don't want to tell him to take that time, if it is not likely to speed things up significantly for him. That said, it seems ridiculous for him to have to ship his hard copy books (by boat - takes something like a month to arrive), with all logistical problems that includes, as well as losing the speed and workflow he's come to count on after using Logos for years.
My question: Is hiding a huge number of these books (perhaps back to close to what he had before the new collection) likely to increase his searching speed significantly?
Thanks for any input - sorry for the long post.
