wishing for more RAM
Jan. 18th, 2009 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaor a better computer.
or something.
When I bought this computer two or three years ago I was upgrading from one with 2 gigs of hard drive, so the 2 gigs of RAM this notebook came with sounded like a plethora.
I have memories of doing my Master's degree using a Pentium 75, which was just fine for the word processing, but a pain to do the figures--particularly getting them sized correctly and put into the correct spot on the pages. There weren't all that many figures for that project, so the technique I used was leave blank boxes within the Word document and then do the figures in CorelDraw positioning them the appropriate distance from the margins of the page, then print the page twice,once for the text, and the second time for the figure. It worked, but it was slow and painful, and caused numerous computer crashes and necessitated re-starting the computer often.
This time I have *way* more figures. Therefore I've decided that rather than trying to put the figures on the same page as the text I'll be putting them on facing pages. All of the text will be on the right hand pages, and all of the figures will be on left hand pages (the Uni's policy on printing is that we can print double sided *if* we use good enough paper that it doesn't bleed through to the other side, so sometime soonish I'll have to go paper shopping for something good enough to do figures on one side, text on the other, without the figures showing through. Sure, it will cost more, but it will be much better than doing a separate volume for the figures (as some people do), and way, way, better than trying to insert them into the text).
In anticipation of doing the figures like this, I decided to start gathering the figures for chapter five together into a "single" document ready for printing, since this is the chapter which is close to done--the thought was that I could give the figures and the chapter to my advisor at the same time--it will be ever so much easier for him to edit the chapter if he can look at the figures too. On another occasion I gave him all of the figures for the chapter tossed into a PowerPoint presentation, with a single slide per figure, that being a quick way to gather them, and didn't require worrying about things like page margins. But as the time to print is getting closer, I thought it worth heading towards an actual final product for that part to save time later.
Silly me, my first thought was that since the Microsoft program Publisher is designed to let one do specific layout and design, it would be a sensible program with which to organize my figures, most of which are graphs created in Excel, and Microsoft products ought to be able to handle data from other Microsoft products. It worked for the first 10 figures. However, the time between hitting "paste" and having the image actually appear took long enough that I kept a sewing project within reach so that I could do some stitching whilst I waited for it. Then the silly program gave up. It told me that it couldn't save any more--the file was too big! Even after re-starting (which I'd done periodically all along during the process of getting it that far--it was going slow enough I thought it needed a break now and then) it wouldn't even let me copy some of the figures to put them into a new file.
So I did the sensible thing. Rather than yielding to the temper tantrum which was begging to come out and screaming at the machine, which hasn't the ears to hear me anyway, I shut down and went for a walk. 45 minutes later, I returned, used the C-Clean program to get rid of any temporary files remaining that should have been deleted during the shut-down process before this, and commenced making the rest of the figures in CorelDraw. This was a vast improvement! With CorelDraw the second I hit "paste" the graph shows up, and when I tell it to change the size, the change is instant. Alas, there is still a *long* wait every time I save the file, but, that is what sewing projects are for!
As I work I read over the text, doing edits as needed, and I've created another spreadsheet which lists every figure's number, its caption, the location of the file from which it originally comes,and the file name of the ready to print version. My goal of putting the entire chapter's worth of figures will not be realized--I'm doing only one to five pages at a time, depending on the size of the file--some graphs seem to be larger than others, for reasons I don't understand.
I had hoped to do all of the figures and the rest of the chapter editing this weekend. No such luck. Over the course of eight hours, 47 minutes today, and four hours yesterday I've managed 21 of 90 figures, which corresponds to the first 13 pages of text (of 40 total). Perhaps tomorrow will go faster. Wish me luck, and much patience my poor computer can't manage what I think it should be able to accomplish at one go.
But what will I stitch tomorrow? I finished converting the huge pair of sweat pants (the "M" in the label must have stood for "Massive") to a more reasonable size today--working a bit at a time in between waiting for the computer to be ready for the next task.
or something.
When I bought this computer two or three years ago I was upgrading from one with 2 gigs of hard drive, so the 2 gigs of RAM this notebook came with sounded like a plethora.
I have memories of doing my Master's degree using a Pentium 75, which was just fine for the word processing, but a pain to do the figures--particularly getting them sized correctly and put into the correct spot on the pages. There weren't all that many figures for that project, so the technique I used was leave blank boxes within the Word document and then do the figures in CorelDraw positioning them the appropriate distance from the margins of the page, then print the page twice,once for the text, and the second time for the figure. It worked, but it was slow and painful, and caused numerous computer crashes and necessitated re-starting the computer often.
This time I have *way* more figures. Therefore I've decided that rather than trying to put the figures on the same page as the text I'll be putting them on facing pages. All of the text will be on the right hand pages, and all of the figures will be on left hand pages (the Uni's policy on printing is that we can print double sided *if* we use good enough paper that it doesn't bleed through to the other side, so sometime soonish I'll have to go paper shopping for something good enough to do figures on one side, text on the other, without the figures showing through. Sure, it will cost more, but it will be much better than doing a separate volume for the figures (as some people do), and way, way, better than trying to insert them into the text).
In anticipation of doing the figures like this, I decided to start gathering the figures for chapter five together into a "single" document ready for printing, since this is the chapter which is close to done--the thought was that I could give the figures and the chapter to my advisor at the same time--it will be ever so much easier for him to edit the chapter if he can look at the figures too. On another occasion I gave him all of the figures for the chapter tossed into a PowerPoint presentation, with a single slide per figure, that being a quick way to gather them, and didn't require worrying about things like page margins. But as the time to print is getting closer, I thought it worth heading towards an actual final product for that part to save time later.
Silly me, my first thought was that since the Microsoft program Publisher is designed to let one do specific layout and design, it would be a sensible program with which to organize my figures, most of which are graphs created in Excel, and Microsoft products ought to be able to handle data from other Microsoft products. It worked for the first 10 figures. However, the time between hitting "paste" and having the image actually appear took long enough that I kept a sewing project within reach so that I could do some stitching whilst I waited for it. Then the silly program gave up. It told me that it couldn't save any more--the file was too big! Even after re-starting (which I'd done periodically all along during the process of getting it that far--it was going slow enough I thought it needed a break now and then) it wouldn't even let me copy some of the figures to put them into a new file.
So I did the sensible thing. Rather than yielding to the temper tantrum which was begging to come out and screaming at the machine, which hasn't the ears to hear me anyway, I shut down and went for a walk. 45 minutes later, I returned, used the C-Clean program to get rid of any temporary files remaining that should have been deleted during the shut-down process before this, and commenced making the rest of the figures in CorelDraw. This was a vast improvement! With CorelDraw the second I hit "paste" the graph shows up, and when I tell it to change the size, the change is instant. Alas, there is still a *long* wait every time I save the file, but, that is what sewing projects are for!
As I work I read over the text, doing edits as needed, and I've created another spreadsheet which lists every figure's number, its caption, the location of the file from which it originally comes,and the file name of the ready to print version. My goal of putting the entire chapter's worth of figures will not be realized--I'm doing only one to five pages at a time, depending on the size of the file--some graphs seem to be larger than others, for reasons I don't understand.
I had hoped to do all of the figures and the rest of the chapter editing this weekend. No such luck. Over the course of eight hours, 47 minutes today, and four hours yesterday I've managed 21 of 90 figures, which corresponds to the first 13 pages of text (of 40 total). Perhaps tomorrow will go faster. Wish me luck, and much patience my poor computer can't manage what I think it should be able to accomplish at one go.
But what will I stitch tomorrow? I finished converting the huge pair of sweat pants (the "M" in the label must have stood for "Massive") to a more reasonable size today--working a bit at a time in between waiting for the computer to be ready for the next task.
