How much juice does Wordfast Classic really need?
Thread poster: momolja (X)
momolja (X)
momolja (X)
United Kingdom
Mar 17, 2015

I have been working with Wordfast Classic for years quite satisfactorily, but increasingly segmentation is very slow, to the extent that Word will crash every few minutes, or letters will appear several seconds after being typed. This does not happen consistently, but increasingly.

According to the Wf website, it should be possible to run Wf Classic on virtually any machine. I use Word (2007) on Windows 7 with a 1.30 GHz processor and 3.00 GB RAM - is that just not enough?


 
Heinrich Pesch
Heinrich Pesch  Identity Verified
Finland
Local time: 14:12
Member (2003)
Finnish to German
+ ...
Perhaps your TM is not ok? Mar 17, 2015

As you stated you have used Wf for years without problem. So this problem should be related to something else than the Wf application itself. Does it happen with small TMs too? When did the problem arise the first time? I had for years Win7 and 4 GB and no slowness, except the usual delay when translating Word-tables.

 
Dominique Pivard
Dominique Pivard  Identity Verified
Local time: 14:12
Finnish to French
Cause of crashes Mar 17, 2015

Wordfast Classic doesn't need much "juice" to run at satisfactorily speed. Crashes would be cause by something else: crashes that occur with every single document could be caused by a faulty Bluetooth driver; when crashes that only occur with some documents, the cause is usually found in the documents themselves (eg. documents converted from PDF's).

 
Dominique Pivard
Dominique Pivard  Identity Verified
Local time: 14:12
Finnish to French
Other add-ins Mar 17, 2015

Heinrich Pesch wrote:
As you stated you have used Wf for years without problem. So this problem should be related to something else than the Wf application itself.

TM's (whether big or small) shouldn't be a problem: a Wf TM is either valid or not, and if not, Wordfast will tell you so rather than merely crashing. Other add-ins (PDF converters etc.) could be a reason. If so, I would uninstall Office, reinstall it and apply all service packs & hotfixes from Microsoft. On a "clean" Office, Wordfast Classic should be stable with proper documents ("rogue" documents are a different story).


 
José Henrique Lamensdorf
José Henrique Lamensdorf  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 09:12
English to Portuguese
+ ...
In memoriam
Video board Mar 17, 2015

I never imagined that WFC was so video-board intensive.

I had a 512 MB nVidia board that developed some trouble. Nvidia tech support directed me to some driver set version being corrupted, so I tried a whole series of drivers, to no avail. It was freezing the entire computer every now and then... however ONLY when I was using WFC; other apps ran okay.

So I removed ALL nVidia drivers, and used it as a plain vanilla VGA board. No more crashes.

Then I bought a
... See more
I never imagined that WFC was so video-board intensive.

I had a 512 MB nVidia board that developed some trouble. Nvidia tech support directed me to some driver set version being corrupted, so I tried a whole series of drivers, to no avail. It was freezing the entire computer every now and then... however ONLY when I was using WFC; other apps ran okay.

So I removed ALL nVidia drivers, and used it as a plain vanilla VGA board. No more crashes.

Then I bought a 2 GB AMD Radeon video board. Surprisingly, it cost one-fourth (yes, 25%) of the equivalent nVidia board at the same store here in Brazil.

Upon removing the nVidia board and checking it carefully, I found a blown electrolytic capacitor, which would be the likely cause for all the trouble. nVidia tech support COULD have told me that, if they only knew it.

Nevertheless, the new board makes WFC run so fast that, if I re-translate a previously translated text, i.e. having a complete TM, using "translate until fuzzy", things goes so fast on the screen that I can't follow them being done.
Collapse


 
momolja (X)
momolja (X)
United Kingdom
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks - will try reinstalling Word Mar 19, 2015

Thank you, all.

I don't think the TM could be the problem - it's large, but surely Wf is meant to cope with that.

I will try reinstalling Word and see how I get on; I'll report back.


 
Lars Jelking
Lars Jelking  Identity Verified
Israel
Local time: 15:12
English to Swedish
+ ...
WFC memory use Mar 30, 2015

Press Ctrl + Alt + Del keys simultaneously to open Windows Task Manager. Under the tab Processes you can se which apps and background processes are working on your computer. You will not find Wordfast in that list because it is not a program, just an add-in to Word.

As Dominique wrote, it is another software that slow your work down.


 
momolja (X)
momolja (X)
United Kingdom
TOPIC STARTER
Reinstallation helped though still not perfect Apr 30, 2015

I've reinstalled Word and now I at least get some extra features that weren't working before (TM suggestions underneath the segment, for instance). Segmentation starts out fine and then slows down again, but at least the document usually recovers and I don't have to actually restart Word. There must be some background process happening that clogs things up and slows them down (if that makes sense in PC terms!).

Thanks all for your comments.


 
José Henrique Lamensdorf
José Henrique Lamensdorf  Identity Verified
Brazil
Local time: 09:12
English to Portuguese
+ ...
In memoriam
Process Explorer Apr 30, 2015

momolja wrote:

I've reinstalled Word and now I at least get some extra features that weren't working before (TM suggestions underneath the segment, for instance). Segmentation starts out fine and then slows down again, but at least the document usually recovers and I don't have to actually restart Word. There must be some background process happening that clogs things up and slows them down (if that makes sense in PC terms!).

Thanks all for your comments.


https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

... should give you info on what's exactly going on inside your computer.


 
Dragomir Kovacevic
Dragomir Kovacevic  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 13:12
Italian to Serbian
+ ...
Antivirus - Layout - Word tollerance of WfC May 1, 2015

Your antivirus programme might be too zealous. Can happen on macros. You might set it not to screen the startup-folder where WfC resides.

Do not insist, if you do, on real document layout during work. I can't remember now how it is called in MS Word. Simply said, insist on "normal" view in Word, during work. Otherwise, MS Word in actual page view, constantly "reformats", "adjusts" the doc aspect.

Also: settings for macros in Word.

As for "background proces
... See more
Your antivirus programme might be too zealous. Can happen on macros. You might set it not to screen the startup-folder where WfC resides.

Do not insist, if you do, on real document layout during work. I can't remember now how it is called in MS Word. Simply said, insist on "normal" view in Word, during work. Otherwise, MS Word in actual page view, constantly "reformats", "adjusts" the doc aspect.

Also: settings for macros in Word.

As for "background process" you mention now after the uninstall-reinstall, now it comes into my mind my intuitive and pseudo-scientific belief: while holding a TM in the client's folder, and BTM in a separate and distant special folder for BTMS, I had a kind of constant scanning process, possibly by WfC. Maybe the span of folders was too huge. I always finished to have zero-byte BTMs of all kinds, placed in my client's TM folder.

momolja wrote:

I've reinstalled Word and now I at least get some extra features that weren't working before (TM suggestions underneath the segment, for instance). Segmentation starts out fine and then slows down again, but at least the document usually recovers and I don't have to actually restart Word. There must be some background process happening that clogs things up and slows them down (if that makes sense in PC terms!).

Thanks all for your comments.
Collapse


 
momolja (X)
momolja (X)
United Kingdom
TOPIC STARTER
Moving TM corrupts it Jun 4, 2015

Dragomir Kovacevic wrote:

As for "background process" you mention now after the uninstall-reinstall, now it comes into my mind my intuitive and pseudo-scientific belief: while holding a TM in the client's folder, and BTM in a separate and distant special folder for BTMS, I had a kind of constant scanning process, possibly by WfC. Maybe the span of folders was too huge. I always finished to have zero-byte BTMs of all kinds, placed in my client's TM folder.


Thanks for the tip on the antivirus, Drago - have made the changes you recommend but will need some time to see if it's made a difference.

As for having TMs in different folders - interesting point! I tried to move my own TM into the folder containing the client TM (which I use as my BTM) to try this out, but the process seems to corrupt my TM, so that Wf complains that it "is not a Wordfast TM" when I try and open it. Luckily I was able to restore a previous version, so no harm done - but isn't this odd? All I did was copy/paste.


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 13:12
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Zero byte TMs Jun 4, 2015

Dragomir Kovacevic wrote:
I always finished to have zero-byte BTMs of all kinds, placed in my client's TM folder.


I also get that (glad I'm not the only one). It happens when the BTM is in a folder that contains other TMs as well, and if the active TM is not in the same folder as the BTM. Thent WFC creates zero byte copies in the active TM's folder of all the TMs that are in the same folder as the BTM. This doesn't affect my speed, though. It's just annoying.


 
momolja (X)
momolja (X)
United Kingdom
TOPIC STARTER
zero byte TM files Jun 4, 2015

Samuel Murray wrote:

Dragomir Kovacevic wrote:
I always finished to have zero-byte BTMs of all kinds, placed in my client's TM folder.


I also get that (glad I'm not the only one). It happens when the BTM is in a folder that contains other TMs as well, and if the active TM is not in the same folder as the BTM. Thent WFC creates zero byte copies in the active TM's folder of all the TMs that are in the same folder as the BTM. This doesn't affect my speed, though. It's just annoying.


Oh, those .Itx, .bak, .old etc. files? Yes, I get that too - can I just delete them?


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 13:12
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
No, we mean TXT files Jun 4, 2015

momolja wrote:
Samuel Murray wrote:
Dragomir Kovacevic wrote:
I always finished to have zero-byte BTMs of all kinds, placed in my client's TM folder.

I also get that (glad I'm not the only one).

Oh, those .Itx, .bak, .old etc. files? Yes, I get that too - can I just delete them?


No, Dragomir and I (if I understand correctly) refer to zero-byte TXT files. You can always safely delete the ITX, BAK and OLD files, or you can leave them in place.


 


To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator:


You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request »

How much juice does Wordfast Classic really need?







Trados Business Manager Lite
Create customer quotes and invoices from within Trados Studio

Trados Business Manager Lite helps to simplify and speed up some of the daily tasks, such as invoicing and reporting, associated with running your freelance translation business.

More info »
Trados Studio 2022 Freelance
The leading translation software used by over 270,000 translators.

Designed with your feedback in mind, Trados Studio 2022 delivers an unrivalled, powerful desktop and cloud solution, empowering you to work in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

More info »