XY, NBwin and large files

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Well, I achieved a new high (or low) in crashing XP. I got NBwin into a
state so bad that XP couldn't kill that process. Not even with the
ctrl-alt-del Task Manager. Had to shut down and reboot.
It came about while I was testing the limits of how big a file NBwin can
handle. I hoped that it wouldn't face Xy's 4-ish meg limit on file size. I
started with an about 300k file open in NBwin and tried to MErge in other
largish files (I had a reason to want to do this--it wasn't just a test). I
merged about 6 files in successfully, then crashed it.
After shutting down and restarting, I was indeed able to CAll a file of 4.5
megs--the file I had been trying to make by doing a bunch of consecutive
MErges. This time, to produce the big file, I STored and re-CAlled the file
after each MErge.
Hmmm . . . just tested MErging the big file's .BAK into the bottom and I
successfully produced an 8+ meg file that NBwin can STore and re-CAll.
By comparison, Tame-Xy can seem to call the 4.5 meg file, but when I try to
go to the bottom of it, I get a random Windows system error: "The system
cannot open COM3 port requested by the application. Inside Xy I get a
(bogus) error message: Disk is full writing to overflow file--free up space
on drive C:. Clearly, these are just random messages produced by out of memory.

Back in NBwin with the 8 meg file, I tried:
 ci /x/^/
just to see if it would work. It did some 16,000 changes in about 45
seconds. I went to the bottom of the file to see that it did indeed make
the changes, and it did. Going back to the top, I did
se/x/
and it *immediately* reported: Cannot find item.
I have even been able to produce and work with a 16 meg file in NBwin. In
it, I did over 200 ChangeInvisibles in 2 seconds.
Moral: if you need to work with a larger file than Xy can handle, NBwin,
used carefully, might be the answer.

Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx