From kcs2c@uva.pcmail.virginia.edu Fri Mar 25 17:00:55 1994 Received: from virginia.edu for kcs2c@uva.pcmail.virginia.edu by www.ccl.net (8.6.4/930601.1506) id QAA13970; Fri, 25 Mar 1994 16:51:13 -0500 Received: from uva.pcmail.virginia.edu by uvaarpa.virginia.edu id aa07845; 25 Mar 94 16:51 EST Received: by uva.pcmail.Virginia.EDU (8.6.8/1.34) id QAA01677; Fri, 25 Mar 1994 16:51:03 -0500 Message-Id: <199403252151.QAA01677@uva.pcmail.Virginia.EDU> From: "Kevin C. Stewart" Date: Fri, 25 Mar 94 16:50:52 EST X-Mailer: UVa PCMail 1.8.4 To: CHEMISTRY@ccl.net Subject: Windows plotting packages Sorry about posting to the whole CCL, I deleted the original poster. Our group uses both Jandel's SigmaPlot for Windows and 3-D Vision's Stanford Graphics Version 2.1. In an unscientific test on a 33 MHz 486 w/ 8Meg running windows 3.11 and Novell 3.11 Netware (programs and data on network server) using a 4 column 2500 line ASCII data file it took: Time to load file Graph refresh time SigmaPlot ~30 sec ~6 sec Stanford ~50 sec ~2 sec The largest files anyone uses here are ~15000 points. There have been complaints about the useability of both programs. IMHO, I think that the limiting performance factor for plotting large data files under windows is RAM, performance plummets when Windows uses the disk as virtual memory. My experience is that programs which are unusable with 4 Megs are acceptable with 8 Megs and really nice with 16 Meg. (Designer 4.0, SigmaPlot, Stanford Graphics) Kevin Charles Stewart Graduate Research Assistant University of Virginia Department of Materials Science Thornton Hall Charlottesville, VA 22903 e-mail: kcs2c@virginia.edu phone: (804) 982-5790