theWord required hardware.
theWord required hardware. (from theWord.net website: http://www.theword.net/index.php?faqanswer.56&l=english)
What hardware do I need?
theWord required hardware. Generally speaking, any modern Pentium PC is capable of running the program. The memory consumption is usually quite low, though it depends on the number of modules you have installed.
Brown The Devil's Mission of Amusement 7 page article from 1889. Hollywood in the church and her ministries. Brown was a student of C.H Spurgeon.
Excerpts:
Different days demand their own special testimony. The watchman who would be faithful to his Lord and to the city of his God needs to carefully note the signs of the times and to emphasize his witness accordingly. Concerning the testimony needed now, there can be little if any doubt. An evil is in the professed camp of the Lord, that is so gross, so brazen in its impudence, that the most shortsighted of spiritual men can hardly fail to notice it.... Amusement for the people is the leading article advertised by each... until the hideous fact has been proved up to the hilt, that "amusement" is ousting "the preaching of the Gospel" as the great attraction... The Concert is fast becoming as much a recognized part of church life as the Prayer Meeting; and it is already, in most places, far better attended.
"Providing recreation for the people" will soon be looked upon as a necessary part of Christian work, and as binding upon the Church of God, as though it were a Divine command, unless some strong voices are raised which will make themselves heard.
Read the 7-page article: Brown, The Devil's Mission of Amusement.
In general, The Word runs surprisingly well on older machines with slower CPU’s and less memory. It has been tested and debugged with more than 600 modules on a 4-year old PC and has performed very well.
In general, The Word is optimized to perform most of it’s tasks quickly, with no waiting whatsoever.
Notes: When theWord runs slower, there is usually a reason. I have run theWord with 5000 modules installed, and it does run well under that load. But the problem comes in initializing. theWord maintains indexes of each module that it has installed, and this is especially true of the Bibles. So at startup of the program, theWord, it will check those Bible indexes, and it will generate any that are missing or damaged. In general, theWord will only generate a topic index on the rest of the modules, so that is rather quick, except if you have 5,000 new modules, and some have hundreds of chapters or topics. But again, all of this will be done once when a new module is introduced, and basically, theWord will not redo it unless you erase the indexes (or transfer the module to another installation of theWord).
Also note that theWord has a special setup for premium under copyright modules, and they will want to reauthenticate if you just copy them into another installation without the password. Authentication is where you have to provide your email and the password given to you when you purchased the module.
From David Cox: Personally, I have run it on a Toshiba 286 (a very old dog of a slow computer) with 6MB of RAM using the USB installation on a USB stick, and it ran quite well. I had about 300-400 modules on the USB stick, with a doggle converting a port on the USB drive entrance, and I was surprised how well it did work.
MAC: theWord is a native PC/Windows program, so there is not a direct way of running theWord on a Macintosh computer or MAC. But having said that, many Macintosh users have pushed until the MAC community have made workarounds for running Windows programs on their Macs, so any of these Windows Emulators will allow you to run theWord on a Mac.