In article , Lawrence
Glickman wrote:


I just performed 170! ( factorial of 170 ). That's the limit on my
*engine*

I got an answer of 7.2574E+306 before I could even take my finger off
the enter key. Is that not fast enough for a *consumer computer*
???????


I despair.

A good example of where many consumer PCs are running out of gas is in
rendering DVDs for burning: this is the equivalent of "ripping" a CD
with music. A friend of mine, who is tech-savvy, is finding a DVD
render is taking about 11 hours on his 1 GHz PC. This is with both
Pinnacle's software and with Adobe's (which he returned when the
claimed "faster than the competition" turned out not to be true, at
least not in his application).

A 2 GHz machine might cut this time approximately in half.

This is a serious rate limiter for many applications, and illustrates
why people who are using their PCs for video editing, music work, scene
rendering, Photoshop, compilation of programs, etc., are buying the
fastest machines they can buy, such as dual-3.4 GHz Pentium 4-based
machines, loaded with RAM.


--Tim May