[DoctorOhh]

Warning the below is a marginally useful response to a totally useless post. Probably best skipped by most.

For anyone coming across this post you canlearn about calibre here and skip the rest.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

I have been using Calibre for over 6 or 7 patches. And it has everything I wanted for my book colection and even a few things more. But everything stops when you end up using a test database of 3 books and move to the real thing. I have put a little over 2500 books, which is only part of the contents of my hard drive and everything went down with a bang.

I have 4350 books and it works fine for me, but if your machine can't handle the load then move on or acquire a newer machine. I usually live at the trailing edge of technology too, but 2G of ram is the minimum I found useful for any set of apps.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

Once it loads it is huge in terms of memory. On a netbook with WinXP which has to fit in 1G of RAM you can't load something like a webbroswer and navigate as one would have to move to swap.

Why does it "has to fit in 1G of RAM"? My daughter's netbook has 2G of ram and runs calibre fine. Most of the netbooks I checked out would let you go to at least 1.5Gs. Again if it doesn't work on your machine why bother us with your whining?

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

The autodetection is nice. But it takes only less than for ever. And there are some issues as it does not identify a book by its contents. It only tries to load the metadata stored infile.

Garbage metadata equals garbage results. This isn't too hard to understand. If your books have crap metadata then don't try to add them to calibre by having calibre search for metadata. Turn off get metadata by book and have it gather the Author and Title from the file name. You must have used some naming format to track your books. Check out the Preferences under Adding books.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

Say it does not find/read the metadata you get Unknown by Unknown and (!) you are prompted for duplicates. MD4 or MD5 are quick enough to help. Even a check of the filesize would show it's not a duplicate.

This is checking for duplicate books not duplicate files. You should clean up your book directories and clear out duplicate files before you even think of adding your books to calibre.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

The last patch has shortened somehow the loading of books in the database, yet it will fail to read some files with an error.

Garbage in garbage out, the PDF metadata reading/writing plugins are sometimes temperamental. These errors can be minimized by using metadata from filename on the initial loading of books. Also adding books in small batches will also minimize errors during adding books.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

And when it will fail with an error you have no way of knowing that the book WAS actually inserted in the database.

The most recently added books pop into the top of the book list. If you doubt that then just click on the date column and sort the library by date added. The most recently added books will become apparent.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

Which leads to another issue - for every tiny patch there is quite a file to be loaded. I'm sure at least the icon themes would not be that interesting to download over and over again. I believe that is a side effect of not having to pay for the actual bandwidth.

It's a side effect of Kovid having better things to do than create/support incremental upgrades for three Operating Systems.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

Also, there is an internal mechanism to access the net for upgrades, yet the upgrade has to be done with a browser. Why?

You aren't even trying to figure this stuff out for yourself are you? There is no internal mechanism to upgrade. There is a mechanism that informs you a upgrade is available.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

If there is the code for checking for upgrades, and the author has thrown in here everything but the kitchen sink (reader, converter, database) and there is a book reader which supports some HTML, yet for checking out the patched issues you get to fire the web browser.

So your whining that Kovid has created an entire suite of very useful features but doesn't support incremental upgrades for 3 different operating systems.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

Which, as I said above, means a lot for a 1G machine. I'm sure that there are geeks out there with 1TB of RAM or even more, yet there are still out there laptops with 256MB or 512MB of RAM. They are quite good for having as book readers, as with my netbook, yet they could not possibly run an unoptimised mammoth like Calibre.

Again calibre runs fine on my daughters ASUS. You can always run the command line tools without opening the GUI for most functions.

Yada Yada Yada ... Yada Yada Yada

More useless whining. It is obvious you have decided to not run calibre, but instead of dealing with your decision like an adult you chose to come here and whine first. Your Mother would be so proud.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

you probably lost your patience to read this.

True

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

My conclusion

Since you told us in the beginning of this post that you don't have a machine capable of running calibre any conclusion you voice would be of no value to anyone reading this forum. Now if calibre was a app you had to purchase before using then this tirade you have posted might be of use to those other folks living on the trailing edge of technology. As it is this tirade is a poor substitute for therapy.

Originally Posted by sidd.artha

And the continuous list of supported news services

The news recipes are primarily created by the user community.

You must have been tired by the end of your post because the whole "Conclusion" paragraph was a little disconnected and barely made sense.