Rich's Ramblings by Rich Schinnell

Published in the February 1996 issue of the Monitor, the monthly magazine of the Capital PC User Group, Inc.

Rich's Ramblings
by Rich Schinnell

I have a new version of an old reliable friend. The new VOPT95 disk optimizer works with DOS and under Windows 95. It installs easily and I seem to get a quite noticeable hard disk access improvement after I run it. I have been a supporter and a registered user of VOPT since back in about 1985 or '86. They had a series of utilities for large hard disks, including diskette drive testers and hard disk optimizers. They were always the fastest and most reliable. So when I received the postcard with the announcement of a new version, guess who was on the phone? This is kind of a mini-review of their latest version.

One thing I like to do is to run an anti-virus program (F-PROT) and a disk optimizer automatically, from AUTOEXEC.BAT, when I start up each day. Some days I have to reboot my machine 10 or 20 times, and each time I would have to abort the virus check or the optimizer because I had just rebooted about 5 minutes ago. For those who are testing programs, this is a continual aggravation. The computer in the CPCUG's Irving Samuels SIG Meeting Room is a classic case of such a thing. We have it set up to run an anti-virus program, F-PROT, each time upon reboot.

With a utility that is supplied as part of the VOPT95 package, that is now a thing of the past. VRUN is a program that is designed to let you run any program on a scheduled basis, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. When you boot and VRUN xxx.exe is in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, the parameters for VRUN will run the program at the frequency you specify in days, for example:

VRUN 1 F-PROT

This line will run my anti virus program, F-PROT, the first time I boot the system that day. From then on, each time I reboot, VRUN recognizes that it has been run once that day and just goes on to the next item in my AUTOEXEC.BAT file. I also only optimize my disk once a week, so I have two lines with the VRUN option. If you only want to run the optimizer once a week and anti-virus once a day, the statements would be

VRUN 1 F-PROT
VRUN 7 VOPT

These lines would execute F-PROT each day, when you first boot, and the Optimizer VOPT only once a week, every seven days.

Other programs included on the disks from Golden Bow are:

VSCAN which scans your hard disk for bad allocation units and tries to recover any data that might be located on any bad sectors that it finds. It will also mark sectors that are not readable as bad, after trying to move any data it can find to good sectors.

VLOC will find any file on your hard disk, using wildcards and such. It will also find duplicate and zero-length files.

VCHECK does a check on your hard disk and lets you know the degree of fragmentation of your files. It will recommend that you optimize if it is too much.

VMAP will display a graphic picture of your drive and its fragmentation.

VSEEK displays a graph of your hard disk's access timing. When finished it gives you the average access time for your hard disk.

VRD is a diskette test program which tells you the head and track alignment.

All in all the VOPT utilities are well worth the investment as an additional tool in your utilities toolbox.

VOPT95 Version 5 sells for $59.00 and is available from Golden Bow Systems, P.O. Box 3039, San Diego, CA 92163, (800) 284-3269.

Tee-Off Time

A pet peeve of mine is this new Microsoft Word. (It comes with Office 95 for Windows 95). Now maybe I am getting set in my ways but I wanted to save this column in WordPerfect 5.1 format with the file extension of .MON so that I could upload it to the MIX BBS for the editor to rip apart before you all got to look at it. Microsoft either has it well hidden or I have missed its option to name my document with any extension besides .DOC. Under Windows 95, the file name ends up as RMS0296.MON.DOC and I can't seem to change it to what I think I want it to be. In other words, MS Word thinks it knows best for me.<G> So I end up having to name it RMS0296 and MS Word adds the .DOC to the end of it. I then have to go to DOS and rename the file. I could probably do it from the MS Explorer or file manager but DOS is still the easiest for me. This is one of the hazards of long file names under Windows 95 -- you can end up with horrible file names.

I thought I bought this software to do what I wanted to do, not what Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decided I should be doing.

I would like to remind all of you to BACKUP your critical data before your hard disk decides to take a vacation. Remember, hard disks always crash at the most inopportune moment -- just when you have not backed up.<G>

What also tees me off are installation programs that mess with my AUTOEXEC.BAT file without my permission or knowledge. But here's something even worse for those of us that use the ANSI.SYS feature for colorizing our prompts in DOS. I have run into a Hewlett Packard scanner software installation program that must have been written by idiots. The installation program for the HP ScanJet Plus is polite, asks me if it can change my CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files, and then gives me options. Then, after I give it permission to change the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, it converts the whole AUTOEXEC.BAT file to UPPERCASE. What a dumb thing to do.

I use the following line in my AUTOEXEC:

prompt $p$g $e[1;44m

This sets my prompt to show the drive and directory, with the background for the screen in blue and the text in cyan. It is important to have the last character be a lower case letter m. With HP's wonderful install program. It was changed to upper case which does not work with the ANSI.SYS driver to set the color. Oh, well, just something to watch out for.

As another aside, I have been a loyal user of QMODEM since it was a version 1.0 shareware program back in the early 80's. I use the QMODEM PRO for DOS version and it works in a DOS window under Windows 95 and it even works in a DOS window under Windows NT 3.51. What a great program! I always seem to fall back to this version so I purchased the Windows 95 version of Qmodem 95 and frankly, I don't like it. I guess I am still a DOS person, even though I have been using Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and now Windows NT. As long as Uncle Bill Gates gives me a DOS window capability in his operating systems, I will be happy. I still love the C:> prompt.

Rich Schinnell is the lame duck president of Capital PC User Group and the sysop of one of the oldest DOS-based BBS's in the country. He is retired from the US Navy and Vitro Corporation. He does a bit of consulting now that he has more free time on his hands. He can be reached at (301) 949-9292 evenings, or the in crowd can e-mail him at schinnel@cpcug.org. Like all techies,

he also has a home page at http://www.cpcug.org/user/schinnel.

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