Because Snowball tries to relieve you of as much drudgery as possible, it does require reasonable computing power and storage space, especially as your database will grow much faster than in other TMs, but if you currently have relatively good performance with your system, you should be OK to start with. It’s recommended that you have at least a 1.5 GHz processer with 512 MB of RAM and 300 MB of free disk space. You may be able to get by with less, but if you are already frustrated with your machine’s performance, your experience with a high-power application like Snowball may not be a rewarding one.
Although Snowball is a standalone program and is inherently very fast, it does have to interact heavily with Microsoft Word. This means that sometimes Snowball will be unable to update the display until Word has finished what it is doing, and as you probably already know, some of these tasks, such as repagination, may take Word a long time. Because you are used to and expect these delays in Word, you may overlook them and attribute them to Snowball when you are waiting for a change in Snowball’s display.
Snowball should run under the following operating systems: Windows 2000 SP3, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows ME, Windows Server 2003, the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista, and Windows XP Service Pack 2.
