UltraRecall vs Web Research... my findings

Posted by Derek Cornish
Jul 13, 2007 at 11:24 PM

JJ -

Interesting. It must be some sort of resource issue for me, I guess. It took about 34 secs for WR to load for the first time on my notebook just now. I had three other programs open at the time and around 55 services running. Running from a standing start - no other software loaded apart from services of one sort or another - it takes around 30 secs. This is loading four collections of 32mb, 16mb, 81mb, 121mb - only 50mb more than you, but 6x longer to load! Must be something wrong somewhere, although I recall long loading times with ContentSaver on my previous Thinkpad.

I looked at the Taskmanager CPU and Pagefile usage and saw nothing out of the way in terms of poor performance while it was loading. I have always assumed that it was just one of those programs that take a long time to load. I’ll have to drop Macropool a line about it.

After WR has loaded, capturing web-pages in FF is quite quick, and my figures are similar to yours. The main difference is I don’t use WR in quite the same way you do. For obvious reasons I tend not to load WR routinely; it takes so long. This means that when I first go to use WR in Firefox it first has to load part (most!) of itself temporarily in memory in order to manage the saving process. This adds to the time taken to actually save the web-page, etc. One way or another, then until all or part of WR is in memory - at start of the day or at the point of first saving a document - I am kept waiting for quite a spell.

> I have one question…. Maybe I’m wrong, but when I was using NetSnippets long ago, it did not index the web pages captured…. Is this true????

Absolutely correct. NetSnippets has no indexed search, but because it does so little - just captures web content - there is very little waiting around. It’s similar in this respect to Scrapbook and both simply use the windows folder system as their “archive”. And although it doesn’t index its archive, any desktop indexed search engine will do so. This is very helpful if you want to search through both NS saved docs and other ones on your HDD at the same time. So sometimes less can be more.

Derek