J R Fox Wrote: >You know, I've probably read through that site about twice a year, and *still* never >really managed to digest some of the key information. I kept thinking that I'd have to >locate a really old version (1.13 ?) of the CD, and these don't seem to be easy to find. >If in fact you are summarily stating that we can "have it all" with V.4, with no residual >advantages to the early versions, I think you may have cut to the chase for me here, >and that will be good news. Jordan-I'm not sure what you mean by "no residual advantages to the early versions." V4 gives you the 7,000 words they added since 1.1, but, as Robert points out somewhere, 1.1 is the core of the dictionary. I don't want to get into an argument on lexicostatistic provenance or supremacy. Old, indeed, is sometimes better (I have an onion-skin paper 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the articles are fabulous, whereas the new Britannica has really been dumbed down.) I had been using the OED online through the university, but it took me lots of clicks to get through the layers of proxy servers and authentication, and, then, of course, the system was sometimes down -- exactly when I needed to look something up quickly. I'm on a Win7/64 machine. I do not use Xywrite anymore (my co-author simply refused to continue with it); I have NB, which is fine for many things, but frankly it's a pain in XP Mode on this machine, so I'm waiting for the 32-bit version. I do a lot of my writing in MSWord -- all the student papers I have to read and all the research articles I edit for colleagues at the medical center are in Word. I'm getting used to it...sort of. With OED4 running in the background, you can simply double click a word in many programs (Word, Acrobat, others) and it will look it up. The dictionary interface is fine, not a work of art to be sure, but easy to work with. Robert has lots of instructions for integrating it with other programs and networking it. I've got it in my startup file to run minimized on bootup. I'm very pleased. One caveat: follow Robert's instructions on how to avoid SecuRom. Simple and effective. It's a very good tool. Michael Norman