Why does Logos 4 have extreme computer requirements?
Comments
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HerbertJRader said:
Hi, This is Herb. While holding church services, quite a lot of "discussion" seems to have been generated, some on the topic. I find it interesting that some people had the expectation that I should be waiting at the computer to respond to their posts.
I think the problem on the particular computer I had mentioned could be with the graphics requirements of L4. Sometimes it starts up, but then crashes the whole computer after a few actions. Sometimes it crashes the computer while starting up. I have a fairly bleeding edge computer (quad core, 8GB RAM ...) and it runs on that one acceptably. On the other one, my upgraded graphics card died and I went back to the onboard graphics. However, Avid Liquid still runs on it.
I never thought that computer specs would be an issue in upgrading, so I never read them until I ran into a problem. Logos really needs to include that information along with all the ads to upgrade.
While not a programmer, I have been installing, using, and troubleshooting a wide range of computer programs since the '80's, and in over 20 years, for the type of program it is, the requirements of L4 surprise me the most.
I am a big fan of Logos, but would consider this release to have been pushed on the consumer without adequate explanation or warning.
This is just a topic for discussion, so please don't ask me any questions or respond to me as a person. I don't know you, don't consider computer forums to be human interaction, and may or may not get a chance in the next few days to check back. (Let's see if that generates any feedback.)
Have a great New Year!
In other words, you don't want to discuss anything, just state your views on system spec's and Logos4.
I'm okay with that.
Help links: WIKI; Logos 6 FAQ. (Phil. 2:14, NIV)
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Rosie Perera said:DouglasEStephens said:
Wow, I hadn't discovered that tool in my Control Panel yet. Thanks! I learn something new every day. I've got a Windows Experience Index of 5.6 (at first it showed up at 1.0 which worried me, but it said there had been some new hardware installed and that I should run an update to compute the new number). My subscores are all 5.9 except my weakest link which is RAM speed -- 5.6. I wonder what the highest possible score is? Even with my fast system I experience slowness in some operations that Logos does -- particularly when I have a passage guide or other computing-intensive window open.
Hey Rosie,
The highest score is 7.9. 5.6 is pretty good, much better than the 3.7 I got. But this laptop still runs very briskly, except for L4 sometimes. Most of the time, it's adequate if I don't overload it though.
BTW, I do consider this to be real human interaction. I feel like I'm getting to know a few of you a little bit. Sure, it's not as good as being there but we do have conversations and share our experiences. I'm really thankful for you guys.
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Another real human here [:P]
The score of my Dell notebook is 4.1 and the weak point is Aero-graphic of Windows. Well, Logos seams to ask for some more graphic power. I have 128 MB nVidia.
Bohuslav
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Bohuslav Wojnar said:
Another real human here
The score of my Dell notebook is 4.1 and the weak point is Aero-graphic of Windows. Well, Logos seams to ask for some more graphic power. I have 128 MB nVidia.
You still scored better than me and mine has 368 meg ATI Radeon. I think most laptops are going to have this weakness in common. That doesn't mean L4 won't work on them, just that it would be really difficult to improve its performance on them.
BTW, it's nice to "chat" with another real human.
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I do think Logos' intent is to be for the masses. The masses may not use all the original language study features available, but it is to everyone's advantage - and essential for Logos long term survival - that Logos be aimed for the largest Bible Study audience possible. So there is some validity to the complaint.
Logos has a difficult task to balance cutting edge technology with broad mass appeal. I think they do a pretty good job of it.
Part of the problem is that we are not satisfied with the program not running "fast enough" on our older computers. If we have to wait 30 seconds for something a faster computer does in 10 seconds we are unhappy. (I am speaking about me, not someone else here.) On the other hand it might take me half an hour or longer to accomplish the same thing with paper books.
Maybe we should pray for patience while we wait the extra 20 seconds on our older computers (and save for a faster computer.)
"In all cases, the Church is to be judged by the Scripture, not the Scripture by the Church," John Wesley0 -
Michael Childs said:
I do think Logos' intent is to be for the masses. The masses may not use all the original language study features available, but it is to everyone's advantage - and essential for Logos long term survival - that Logos be aimed for the largest Bible Study audience possible. So there is some validity to the complaint.
Logos has a difficult task to balance cutting edge technology with broad mass appeal. I think they do a pretty good job of it.
Logos also explicitly states in their mission statement: "It's our responsibility to ensure that the investment in technology we can afford to make because we serve the western church pays dividends for the whole world." And they hope we will see Logos as "a way to make Bible study resources more accessible to the church in developing countries." To repeat that kind of mission twice in a rather short mission statement implies that it is quite an important emphasis of theirs. I think as brothers and sisters in Christ we do need to hold them accountable to keep their mission statement always in mind as they develop ever better and better versions of the product. They need to make sure it will still work for people in the developing world who can't necessarily afford the powerful machines we can and who often get our hand-me-downs.
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Rosie Perera said:
To repeat that kind of mission twice in a rather short mission statement implies that it is quite an important emphasis of theirs. I think as brothers and sisters in Christ we do need to hold them accountable
I think you hit the nail on the head. I mentioned previously, that despite their intentions and the mission statement, LOGOS the company has a pretty US-centric view of things. Internet connectivity being one. Hardware requirements being another. Ability to order resources (even free ones) only if you have a credit card on file is the third. Pricing for a base package and resources available (not available) in a foreign language being 4th. (hey, what about Chinese? There are how many BILLION Chinese-speakers in the world?) I am sure that other brothers and sisters living outside of the US and especially in developing countries could add to this.
I am VERY grateful that Logos listens - I got a personal reply from Bob when I offered my help translating the interface into Russian. I also know that LOGOS is a business. I know they have priorities and I am confident that many foreign missionaries, pastors, lay leaders and Christians all around the world will one day reap the benefits of Logos. However it does not hurt to remind the company that not all of its users reside in the US and especially that the potential of growth will come from other lands.
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The issue of accountability is a good point. I appreciate what Logos is attempting to do so I've been reluctant to express the view that , to date, Logos has missed the mark with L4. Understandably, folks come to the product with differing expectations but as an individual who isn't a programmer and simply wants a product that "works" it really feels like Logos has laid an egg with respect to performance; the program is slow and very basic features seem to be absent or poorly implemented and this seems true both on my (relatively new) laptop and (very new) desktop. Just as an example: why can't the program keep up with typing when entering text into notes? There's an unacceptable delay in the display -- especially when one considers my typing speed. This is just basic functionality. Right now I couldn't reccomend this program to a friend in good faith and that's a shame because L3 was, by far, one of the finest programs I've ever used. If Logos is really looking to develop a tool for "the masses" perhaps they need to temper vision with the reality of implementation.
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Very well said Gregg. I do have a bit of programming experience and I can't for the life of me understand why this program should make such heavy demands on a computer. Considering the notes function, why can't such a basic note editor respond better? Microsoft Word has much more overhead and should place a lot more demand on the system than this note pad does. Yet Word does this gracefully. Now, I know that L4 does a lot more but most of us don't have it doing searches or running reports while we are typing notes. So when the note editor is in focus, everything else should be backgrounded. But it's not. It's like you said, the display has a hard time keeping up and it's like L4 has to just gggrrrrriiiiiinnnnnddddd to get anything on the screen. Something's wrong with that.
This program looks much better than L3 did. I like the new features too. But the code needs a major overhaul before it's going to be really functional. I just can't see it being so much more demanding than L3 was. So, it draws the screens now instead of using IE8. Then the screen editors need to be more in line with the efficiency of IE8.
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DouglasEStephens said:
Very well said Gregg. I do have a bit of programming experience and I can't for the life of me understand why this program should make such heavy demands on a computer.
I am a novice on a computer (but have used high-end 3D CAD systems at work doing complex rendering of surfaces on mold tools and stamping dies) and even some of these now do not have the sluggishness of L4. On my less than a year old HP laptop (built for entertainment) L4 is slow when I have notes, five or less commentaries open and a passage guide. I do think that items like the "paintball graphics" on the help for the screen and other graphical items that people have suggested is not what Logos was known for earlier. It was my best choice for building a seminary type library that I could take anywhere. Even without an internet connection. Now some of the new resources are not even available on a DVD or CD! My six year old HP laptop runs L3 fine without an internet connection most of the time. (Some rural churches don't have WiFi~!). Look at some of the other threads out there on this forum about having Logos 4 have a "graphical bookshelf" which would pull the book off of the shelf and open to the page we wanted to look at??? Some very inexpensive Bible softwares already have this "feature" which I find just fluff and not stuff. I want resources (that are affordable) and the ability to access them anywhere in a reasonable amount of time without having to upgrade my computer graphics card or any other portion of the computer. I would rather spend the money on resources. And see more resources come to publication faster.
Just my two cents. I am not angry. I just love books about the Book - the Bible. And also books on church dynamics, growth, evangelism, etc.
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Sorry I'm so late to this discussion.
The "big" reason we require a new machine is that we chose .NET/WPF. We knew it would have a performance penalty (though it was impossible to predict exactly what), but, as has been pointed out, we're designing for the future.
Despite assertions to the contrary, many of us here actually do know how to write code. In "real" programming languages.
But there are trade-offs involved. As you move up to higher-level abstractions you lose performance. But it's easier to code in high-level abstractions.
Years ago I was exposed to the internal data structures of another Bible software program. It ran on MS-DOS and was intentionally designed to serve "missionaries with old computers", among others. The data structures were beyond efficient. If you'll forgive a geeky example:
majesty -> Exod 15:7; Deut 33:17; Deut 33:26; 1 Chron 16:27; ....
This is the "hit list" of verses containing the word "majesty". This list is what you could report back to users. But if you take the time to number the verses, you can store it in less space (at the cost of writing more code).
majesty: 945; 1527; 1536; 2104; etc.
There are < 32,000 verses in the (protestant, 66-book canon) Bible. So you can store these numbers in two-byte integers. Each "hit" then costs two bytes.
Or, you can store the first hit, and then the difference between it and the next hit.
majesty: 945: 582; 9; 568
Because for a word like "the", which appears in almost every verse, or even a word (like a name) that only appears in one small section of the text, all of these occurrences (and thus differences from one hit to the next) might be less than 256 apart. So then you can use one byte to store the hits for these words.
And guess what? Some words are so close, sometimes you can store the difference in half a byte. But then just one occurrence that's more than 8 verses from the previous messes you up... so what if you store the hit list in chunks of memory, and mark each chunk with the minimum difference storage size needed for that chunk, so you use 1 byte for the first group of hits, but only half a byte for the group of hits where there was a dense cluster, and then...
You get the point. You can really tighten up your storage requirements (and memory requirements, and speed) if you're wiling to write a lot of finely tuned code. As I recall, he had a six bit option, based on his textual analysis that showed it would be as useful as the half and full byte.
Reading the files was a pain. Testing, debugging, and writing the program was slow, too.
And when he added a German Bible later all kinds of things were messed up. He had been equally efficient storing the words themselves, and hard-coded certain assumptions about their size and distribution, which were messed up by the fact that German is about 30% longer than English in characters, and German uses compound words, which creates more unique words in a Bible.
The Logos solution? We used four bytes for every hit. Easy to code, easy to test, easy to understand. Flexible enough to allow for the Apocrypha, and then for other books much longer than the BIble. Then, once it all worked right, we used an off-the-shelf compression algorithm to batch compress and decompress large chunks of hits. This was a profligate waste of memory at the time -- it needed a 12k buffer, when the other solution required less than 1k -- and generated slightly less efficient compression (a point or two?). But it prepared us to add 10,000 books to our system. And to ship sooner. And to handle languages and problems we could never have anticipated.
Today we work in roughly the same way. We don't aim for the smallest, fastest execution. We aim for the best product, compromising some efficiency for more functionality.
WPF offers massive gains in efficiency coding user interface (where you actually use the product!) in exchange for some performance penalties. To be fair to WPF, it does allow you to do many things "the old way", which will execute faster. But then you have to write a lot more code, and it's harder to fix / change / experiment with.
Take a look at the "grid" view of a Bible search through "Top Bibles." In WPF that screen can be coded very quickly if you treat it as a grid control containing rectangle "visual objects". You can then assign each rectangle a data property (the verse and translation it represents) and ask it to report a mouse-over, which will then fire the tool-tip. Easy. The grid control will manage everything, including changing the width of the columns and redisplaying the table when you add "2 Thessalonians" as a hit and need more space on the left.
But a search of 5 Bibles for a common word makes a lot of visuals. And each "visual object" in the "visual tree" WPF manages for you is expensive in memory, and the time to allocate / deallocate that memory.
So, if you want, you can "paint" the screen the old way. Just tell WPF you've got one "visual object" -- a white background -- and then "paint" the text, rectangles, etc. onto the screen. Uses a lot less memory, and it's fast. But now you've got to write code to manage the mouse hovering. It's not hard, but you've got to account for the bigger width of the first column, possibly repaint the hovered box, map the positions to your internal data structures, etc. You're doing a custom implementation just for this one screen.
And then what happens when some beta tester points out that this hand-coded screen could be improved if it just had this different arrangement/feature? A quick, easy change if WPF is managing the layout and hit-testing, a lot of re-write if you're hand-painting things.
Forgive me, but I hung a sign in the development area: "Code first, optimize later." We're feature driven. Then we go back and optimize the features that are too slow. Some of that does (and did) happen before we ship, and other things wait for feedback. And yet others wait to become non-issues as Moore's Law make them less relevant.
You may not like my strategy. That's fine. But I didn't feel like we needed to take the "fastest, tightest" path, since The Online Bible was already doing it. (And still is: you'll find it at http://www.onlinebible.net/describe.html, and I'm sure it runs like the blazes on older machines.) We wanted to take the "coolest, most powerful" path.
It was just a choice, and not even a moral one. I think the arguments about people in places where they can't afford faster computers don't make sense. What about the people in places where they can't afford computers at all? Should we all use paper books for moral reasons? Why is it okay to assume a computer, but wrong to assume a recent computer?
Lastly, I'll point out that Logos 4 does do a lot more than Logos 3. Features like sympathetic highlighting, the Explorer tool, and others are doing massive amounts of background searching and data manipulation. Our text display is doing more than it used to: we've improved our typographic layout, which takes more time. Even our tabs are remeasuring, resizing, and changing the displayed text every time you adjust a tile size. All this takes processor time.
Yes, there's room to optimize, and we're doing that. Many of you have already noticed that we've sped up "sticky spots" just in the 4.0a and 4.0b releases. We'll continue to do that. Obviously we don't want to ship a product no one can stand using. But you have to choose a market, and we've chosen "today and tomorrow" over "yesterday". With Moore's Law doubling your computing power every 18 months, and our choice of technology platform only being revised every 8(?) years, I think you'll be glad we did.
At least in 18 months. :-)
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Bob, thanks for that explanation. I'm already glad you made the decisions you did, and am happy with your development team's response time on speed improvements when we report "sticky spots." Will continue to do so as I come across them. But for the most part, Logos 4 is running very well on my fast machine. So I'm a happy camper. [:)]
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Bob Pritchett said:
Years ago I was exposed to the internal data structures of another Bible software program. It ran on MS-DOS and was intentionally designed to serve "missionaries with old computers", among others. The data structures were beyond efficient. If you'll forgive a geeky example:
majesty -> Exod 15:7; Deut 33:17; Deut 33:26; 1 Chron 16:27; ....
This is the "hit list" of verses containing the word "majesty". This list is what you could report back to users. But if you take the time to number the verses, you can store it in less space (at the cost of writing more code).
majesty: 945; 1527; 1536; 2104; etc.
There are < 32,000 verses in the (protestant, 66-book canon) Bible. So you can store these numbers in two-byte integers. Each "hit" then costs two bytes.
Or, you can store the first hit, and then the difference between it and the next hit.
majesty: 945: 582; 9; 568
Because for a word like "the", which appears in almost every verse, or even a word (like a name) that only appears in one small section of the text, all of these occurrences (and thus differences from one hit to the next) might be less than 256 apart. So then you can use one byte to store the hits for these words.
And guess what? Some words are so close, sometimes you can store the difference in half a byte. But then just one occurrence that's more than 8 verses from the previous messes you up... so what if you store the hit list in chunks of memory, and mark each chunk with the minimum difference storage size needed for that chunk, so you use 1 byte for the first group of hits, but only half a byte for the group of hits where there was a dense cluster, and then...
You get the point. You can really tighten up your storage requirements (and memory requirements, and speed) if you're wiling to write a lot of finely tuned code. As I recall, he had a six bit option, based on his textual analysis that showed it would be as useful as the half and full byte.
Reading the files was a pain. Testing, debugging, and writing the program was slow, too.
Kind of reminds me of how the developers coded the first version of Microsoft Money to be really tight and fast and use very little memory. We saved memory on the storage of every date by encoding the year as a number from 0 to 127 (offsets from an arbitrary date of 1917, if I recall). Thus we could only represent dates up to 2044. We figured that was sufficient. Nobody would be still using this version of the product that many years into the future, or needing to enter financial records from before WWI. And yes our data files were tiny, and Money was blazingly fast. Our technical lead insisted on using a 286 PC as his development machine, so that he'd be able to test and make it fast enough for our lowest-end users (high-end 386's and early 486's were out already at the time). But our clever date storage mechanism did mean jumping through hoops in the code, and eventually having to rewrite the whole kernel when we switched to a database backend. I remember being totally opposed to that switch because I liked the old geeky way we'd done it. However I've gained perspective since then....Sometimes you just need to move on and get with the future.
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Bob Pritchett said:
Forgive me, but I hung a sign in the development area: "Code first, optimize later." We're feature driven. Then we go back and optimize the features that are too slow. Some of that does (and did) happen before we ship, and other things wait for feedback. And yet others wait to become non-issues as Moore's Law make them less relevant.
Forgiveness is a trait of most Christians, so please accept it freely from the forum writers who don't get to see the inside of Logos and your plans for the future.
Bob Pritchett said:Yes, there's room to optimize, and we're doing that. Many of you have already noticed that we've sped up "sticky spots" just in the 4.0a and 4.0b releases. We'll continue to do that. Obviously we don't want to ship a product no one can stand using. But you have to choose a market, and we've chosen "today and tomorrow" over "yesterday". With Moore's Law doubling your computing power every 18 months, and our choice of technology platform only being revised every 8(?) years, I think you'll be glad we did.
At least in 18 months. :-)
Very glad that you did. Searches are much faster in my L4 experience.
But please remember that some places, ie Kentucky (and I live and work here, this is not a joke) do NOT have broadband internet connections everywhere. I cannot even take advantage of a 3g phone because it is not supported where I live. So please continue to make resources etc. available via the mail on CDs and DVDs.
How else do we get to see such interesting old stamps without it?
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Bob, that was a very informative and interesting post. I learned some good stuff.
You said, "Forgive me, but I hung a sign in the development area: 'Code first, optimize later.'" I'll forgive if you repent! [:D]
All kidding aside, I do look forward to further optimization, espeically with notes. I am seriously considering moving over to Logos 4 for notes because of the automatic linking to references. But I have some very long notes and right now if I get over four lines, it gets so slow that its hard to use.
But since upgrading and getting over the shock of the change in interface and then seeing how much improvement there has been in 4.0b, I have invested about 2 grand in new resources. So I am committed to Logos 4.
There are some very small things that I think you can change that will really help with the interface shock. Putting simple things like a max, min, close button on the upper right corner like almost all windows programs have. Speeding up notes. Making the whole interface more contrasty (is that a word). Make the scroll bars always visible like on the Mac version.
There will be some growing pains since you chose the architecture you did. People are buying a lot of netbooks and cheap laptops.
Dr. Kevin Purcell, Director of Missions
Brushy Mountain Baptist Association0 -
Bob Pritchett said:
But you have to choose a market, and we've chosen "today and tomorrow" over "yesterday". With Moore's Law doubling your computing power every 18 months, and our choice of technology platform only being revised every 8(?) years, I think you'll be glad we did.
At least in 18 months. :-)
Thanks again Bob for weighing in. I know you don't have time to read and respond to every post as you continue to actually run the company, but these long posts are chock-full of information which not only answer the questions, but demonstrate your commitment.
Sarcasm is my love language. Obviously I love you. 0 -
Bob Pritchett said:
Yes, there's room to optimize, and we're doing that. Many of you have already noticed that we've sped up "sticky spots" just in the 4.0a and 4.0b releases. We'll continue to do that. Obviously we don't want to ship a product no one can stand using. But you have to choose a market, and we've chosen "today and tomorrow" over "yesterday". With Moore's Law doubling your computing power every 18 months, and our choice of technology platform only being revised every 8(?) years, I think you'll be glad we did.
At least in 18 months. :-)
Okay, okay. I see your point. Frankly, I've wanted an i7 system since the thing came out anyway and you've given me a wonderful excuse to buy one. And I do see that you are optimizing the system and making it better and I hope you understand that I do think that L4 is the best piece of Bible software to ever hit the market. One thing that you could do (and I think you are doing) is listen to what a LOT of us have said about the notes function. Now, I know that L4 was not designed to be the greatest note editor (same as L3). However, many of us would love to be able to keep our notes in L4 with a note editor that we consider to be functional. This one is not there yet. Many of us also use Microsoft's OneNote for notekeeping. It is great and for the most part it functions right alongside L4 with no problems. We can even pin it over a portion of our screen so that it doesn't disappear when it loses focus. The problem is that our notes our not searchable inside of L4 and we want that. So, you could make a lot of us happy by giving us a notes function in L4 that has some of functionality of OneNote, that is quick and responsive (maybe background other things while notes are in focus), and that doesn't treat our notes as second class behind our other resources. These are resources that we have created from our hours of study and they are important to us. So (hopefully) they are important to you too.
Does it sound like I'm complaining? I hope not. My wife says that my tone can get in the way of my message to her sometimes. Maybe that comes across in my writing too. If so, I apologize. I promise you than my main reason for mentioning this is to help you make your program better for all of us. I think that's one of the puposes of these forums. I do love this product. It helps me to understand the Word of God better and there's not much on this planet that's more important than that to me, other than getting that same Word into the hearts of others, and this product helps me do that too. I am a loyal Logos customer and will continue to be. So please understand that my intention is to help. Thanks for giving us a voice.
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DouglasEStephens said:
The problem is that our notes our not searchable inside of L4 and we want that. So, you could make a lot of us happy by giving us a notes function in L4 that has some of functionality of OneNote, that is quick and responsive (maybe background other things while notes are in focus), and that doesn't treat our notes as second class behind our other resources.
Unfortunately this whole "Notes" issue is a bit of a non-starter. Bob has continually said that Notes are for "quick" annotations. He wants you to use Word.
Unless we think that Bob might be like the "stubborn" Judge in Jesus parable that was finally "convinced" by the widow's incessant ......(fill in your own blank)?
So far the only thing that has been really "searchable" in Logos was the Sermon File add-in. And the new version has not yet been released to the beta stream, so we have NO idea yet what it will look like or how it will operate. Who knows, it might even be a good substitute for all of the improvements folks want in Notes.
But Notes or no notes, WPF or even WFF aside:
-- what I would "like" to "see" are Scroll bars that are visible and that move "as smooth as silk" as they did in Libronix 3.
Is that something that will be or can be "optimized"? Or do all of you with the screaming new i7's wonder what I'm even hoping to see because yours are so cutting edge fast that they "cut through butter"? If they do, could you phone my wife and tell her that Steve would really, really, really benefit from one of them? [;)]
Thanks
Steve
Regards, SteveF
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Kevin A. Purcell said:
But I have some very long notes and right now if I get over four lines, it gets so slow that its hard to use.
I realize that several people have reported this but I've had no trouble on [2002[ XP - definately not a souped-up machine.[:(]
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Stephen Filyer said:
Unfortunately this whole "Notes" issue is a bit of a non-starter. Bob has continually said that Notes are for "quick" annotations. He wants you to use Word.
Unless we think that Bob might be like the "stubborn" Judge in Jesus parable that was finally "convinced" by the widow's incessant ......(fill in your own blank)?
I'm not so sure. Our notes do appear in My Content - a huge improvement. This also addresses our desire to connect a note to multiple texts ... we may not have the little colored box everywhere but I won't quibble over that. We know they are working on the linking issue. I think most of us are willing to build special format content in other tools as long as we can copy it into notes ... although we might draw the line in slightly different places. Which leaves the two biggies (1) collapsing notes and (2) sequencing notes. Both of these are features we had in L3 and Bob has been receptive to reinstating features. And we just gained an "ace in the hole" - who better to convince Logos to reinstate a feature than a professor with all those impressionable young minds seeing their revered PROFESSOR use Logos in the classroom. Talk about a long, free commercial ...
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Stephen Filyer said:
Or do all of you with the screaming new i7's wonder what I'm even hoping to see because yours are so cutting edge fast that they "cut through butter"? If they do, could you phone my wife and tell her that Steve would really, really, really benefit from one of them?
I'll let you know after I get mine up and running (hopefully by Friday). And it kind of looks like that's the way we're going to have to go. Fortunately, my wife has been cooperative when I've asked for tech upgrades. I mostly only ask when I really need them though. And she knows that my Bible studies are important, so that helps with her. Anyway, I'll send your wife a personal plea on your behalf if this works out well for me. [:)]
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DouglasEStephens said:
I'll let you know after I get mine up and running (hopefully by Friday). And it kind of looks like that's the way we're going to have to go. Fortunately, my wife has been cooperative when I've asked for tech upgrades. I mostly only ask when I really need them though. And she knows that my Bible studies are important, so that helps with her. Anyway, I'll send your wife a personal plea on your behalf if this works out well for me.
Please do! (I mean, that is, share your "i' experience....)
Actually my wife is very understanding of my "Logos" issues.
But if I laid out the money for a new laptop on top of my other "upgrades" I'm afraid that the cheque would come "bouncing" back towards me!
Regards
Steve
Regards, SteveF
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SteveF said:
Please do! (I mean, that is, share your "i' experience....)
Actually my wife is very understanding of my "Logos" issues.
But if I laid out the money for a new laptop on top of my other "upgrades" I'm afraid that the cheque would come "bouncing" back towards me!
Regards
I understand completely. Actually, all of the parts for the new system came in today and I have spent most of the afternoon and evening putting it together. Unfortunately, I received a defective graphics card (EVGA nvidia 9800 series) and had to put an old one in. The one I installed is an EVGA nvidia 9500 series. It still have 1 Gig of ram but it's ddr2 instead of ddr3. But it works until I get a replacement for the other one.
I've installed Windows 7 professional and drivers and stuff like that. I have L4 on there and have scanned my external hard drive to save the 7GB download. It's preparing my library now and I'm going to let it index tonight. I won't actually get to use it until tomorrow evening. However, just having L4 up to do the scanning, I can already tell a major difference from my laptop. It's has an AMD Turion Ultra X2 running at 2.2 GHz, 3 GB DDR2, 320 GB 7200 rpm hd, 368MB ATI radion graphics. It runs pretty good but nothing like this thing.
What was really cool about L4 is when I had it up, it tried to remember a layout that I had been using on my laptop and had my notes and clippings files installed. It didn't have anymore resources though, so now I wait. I will give an update tomorrow to let you know the final verdict. I'm looking forward to getting to try L4 tomorrow. It'll be after work though. Take care.
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Wow! My library is prepared so I couldn't wait to play around a little. The difference in this program is unbelievable. Even while the thing is indexing, I'm able to move around quickly, type notes, quickly and the cursor stays with my typing, scrolling from the mouse wheel works without running as administrator. It's unreal at how fast the windows scroll, and at how fast the library items scroll. If you can believe this, it appears to run L4 (even while indexing) as fast as the dual core ran L3. This kind of puts the argument to rest for me. L4 is not as sloppy a program as I thought it was, it just take a racehorse of a computer to run it. I'm blown away at this thing right now.
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DouglasEStephens said:
Wow! My library is prepared so I couldn't wait to play around a little. The difference in this program is unbelievable. Even while the thing is indexing, I'm able to move around quickly, type notes, quickly and the cursor stays with my typing, scrolling from the mouse wheel works without running as administrator. It's unreal at how fast the windows scroll, and at how fast the library items scroll. If you can believe this, it appears to run L4 (even while indexing) as fast as the dual core ran L3. This kind of puts the argument to rest for me. L4 is not as sloppy a program as I thought it was, it just take a racehorse of a computer to run it. I'm blown away at this thing right now.
Thanks for this update. It is Very helpful!
And it sounds like 'drivers" have not been too much of an issue?
Steve
Regards, SteveF
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SteveF said:
Thanks for this update. It is Very helpful!
And it sounds like 'drivers" have not been too much of an issue?
Not at all. Let me say that when putting this system together, I didn't skimp on anything. I bought a great motherboard made by Intel (I figure no one knows their processors like they do), The i7 860 (could have got the 870 for $250 more but it seemed overkill), 8GB of ddr3 1600MHz ram (maybe extreme but sets me up for the future), and I still have a graphics card coming. The graphics card I ordered was defective, so I'm going through an exchange. Everything I bought was good quality. I think that makes a difference in how strong a computer is. I've been studying with L4 for the past two hours and it has performed flawlessly. I'm so much more content with this program now. It's night and day difference.
So, let me say to Steve's wife (as I promised), please let Steve have an i7 system. It will help his studies. lol! God bless you.
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DouglasEStephens said:
So, let me say to Steve's wife (as I promised), please let Steve have an i7 system. It will help his studies. lol! God bless you.
As the "kids" say: ROTFL [:D]
Thanks
Regards, SteveF
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DouglasEStephens said:
Wow! My library is prepared so I couldn't wait to play around a little. The difference in this program is unbelievable. Even while the thing is indexing, I'm able to move around quickly, type notes, quickly and the cursor stays with my typing, scrolling from the mouse wheel works without running as administrator. It's unreal at how fast the windows scroll, and at how fast the library items scroll. If you can believe this, it appears to run L4 (even while indexing) as fast as the dual core ran L3. This kind of puts the argument to rest for me. L4 is not as sloppy a program as I thought it was, it just take a racehorse of a computer to run it. I'm blown away at this thing right now.
Wow! That's wonderful to hear. Now if only we would all upgrade to blazing fast machines there would be no more griping about performance issues... [:)]
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Rosie Perera said:
Wow! That's wonderful to hear. Now if only we would all upgrade to blazing fast machines there would be no more griping about performance issues...
My prayers will be going out for you all on this issue (seriously). I'm still hoping for the kind of optimization that will make L4 run more acceptably on a dual-core machine, as I and many others use them (my laptop). Some on this forum are still using single-core P4s. But I can see what Bob was getting to on his post above. In a few years, most all of us will be running at the quad-core or above level and we will be thankful that they designed this program the way they did. You just have to see it to appreciate it. I think this is kind of what Richard has been driving at to. He has been running L4 on an i7 system all along and hasn't experienced the problems most of us have been discussing. Now, I know why.[:)]
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