When is a document a long one? When it's over 32,767 characters, according to Psion.

That's about five and a half thousand words, and as much as version 2.0 of the Quill will let you save. Try saving a longer piece of text, e.g. merging documents, and you could end up with a hung QL.

Psion blames QDOS for not behaving as the manual states. Apparently, the new, faster saving routine upsets SOS (Sinclair Operating System), but fear not, a patch is on its way. The patch restores Quill 2.0's slow saving speed, so when you most need speed you can't have it. Archive now suffers from a similar problem.

Sinclair has little to say on the subject, other than that one shouldn't expect too much from a £100 word processor. "It was not designed to be a mega word processor," said a spokesman.

Sinclair's latest press release for Xchange reads: "Version 2.0 programs reflect the style and functionality of the individual modules of Psion's business software." Shouldn't that read "small business"?

10 a=RESPR(55*1024)
20 b=15584*a
30 PRINT "Loading....":LBYTES mdv1_quill,a
40 IF PEEK_W (b)<>20154 OR PEEK_W (b+2)<>2192 THEN GOTO 80
50 POKE_W b,20081:POKE_W b+2,20081
60 PRINT "Saving....":DELETE mdv1_quill:SEXEC mdv1_quill,a,51760,1280
70 PRINT "Finished":STOP
80 PRINT "Wrong Version - This patch only works on QUILL 2.0"