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

Rich's Ramblings

by Rich Schinnell

Ok, it is tax time again, and this year I opted for Quicken's Turbo Tax Deluxe. Great program and very easy to use -- as long as you have a sound card and a CD-ROM. If you have a sound card, Turbo Tax Deluxe lets you see and hear experts give you advice and planning information for your 1996 tax year.

Installation is a piece of cake and it does a nice job of leading you through all the different forms by asking you all the right questions. Turbo Tax Deluxe comes with an Internet browser (Netscape) that will log onto Intuit's World Wide Web site for additional information and updates, as long as you have an Internet connection (either TIA or SLIP/PPP account). The nice thing is that you can also order the appropriate state version of Turbo Tax while you're on line. The $24.95 for the state version is about the going rate.

I had a few (make that a lot of) problems getting the state version to install on my Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 machines. It kept installing and saying that it was successfully installed, but would not show up on the state return menu bar. Oh well, I will call the tech support number. On my nickel I called and am real happy that I did this on a weekend. The call(s) took over an hour to resolve finally. The tech support people were very helpful and asked me lots of questions. I finally tried to install it in so many different ways that one worked. The State version seems to want to install from the C:\DISK1 directory. I had purchased the Maryland version and it imported all my federal information without a hitch.

All in all, I would give a hearty recommendation to Turbo Tax Deluxe. Its cost varies by whether you get it at Price Club or by mail from Intuit. I made the mistake last year of ordering directly from Intuit and I was disappointed that Price Club had it cheaper. As always, shop around for these things for the best price. Now go do your taxes for '95. . . .

SCSI Trials

Ok, now for the chapter on my trials and tribulations with SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface). The January CPCUG general meeting was supposed to feature Adaptec, but ole man winter decided to intervene and dump over a foot of snow on the area. The meeting was canceled and hopefully will be rescheduled later this year. Adaptec is the leader in SCSI, as they have been in it for so long. There are others that make SCSI adapters but most try to emulate Adaptec's standards.

Using that logic, when I bought my new Pentium machine last summer, I opted for an Adaptec 2940 PCI adapter board, thinking that I should know something about SCSI. I purchased a speed demon 3X SCSI CD-ROM to put on the SCSI bus along with my external SCSI Iomega Zip drive. I have two installed IDE hard disks, so I was not thinking about using the SCSI hard disk feature. I installed all this under Windows 95 and the ASPI drivers that Adaptec provides were great. No problems with my CD-ROM or my Zip drive under Windows 95 or Windows 3.1.

Note: Iomega's parallel port Zip drive under Windows 95 requires
the purchase of separate drivers directly from Iomega. Bad move there, Iomega.

Then the price of hard disks started dropping even further. I finally succumbed to the lure of a 1-gigabyte SCSI-2 hard disk for $200. Being one who spends a lot of time going to the computer shows at the Montgomery County fairgrounds and even traveling to Virginia's NOVA campus for those shows, I thought that it would be nice to try to add another hard disk to my machine. (Most who know me, know that I am a glutton for punishment.) I purchased the 1-gig drive, and after rearranging the cables to put the new hard disk inside my tower, it was all hooked up and ready to go. The machine booted properly into Windows 95 on the IDE disk, and the SCSI hard disk was immediately recognized by the SCSI board's boot ROM. But because the SCSI disk was not formatted, it was not recognized by the operating system.

I have the following drive letters in use:

A -- floppy
C -- boot IDE hard disk (removable, 205 MB)
D -- second IDE hard disk, 570 MB
E -- Zip drive 100 MB removable cartridge
F -- Pinnacle RCD 5020 writable CD-ROM, external SCSI bus G -- internal CD-ROM with audio connection to a ProAudio 16

sound board

I through Z -- My network drive letters for my Novell local area
network

I thought that all I had to do was to run FDISK and it would then assign the letter E to my new 1-gig drive. Mistake number 1. For some reason I could not get it to work under Windows 95. I then decided to see what I could do under plain old DOS. I finally booted with a DOS disk in drive A and was able to take my existing 2 IDE disks out of the picture from CMOS. I had a rough time of it but was finally successful with FDISK and the Format command.

Waste of Space

I now had a SCSI C drive under DOS with over a gigabyte of hard disk available. The downside was the cluster size of 32,000 bytes as a minimum allocation. If you want to see wasted space, just create DOS partitions greater than 512 MB. Each file, regardless of how small it is, ends up taking the minimum allocation in space. For example all those tiny WordPerfect macros will each take up 32K of disk space.

I digress: Remember the days of the 101 macros for WordPerfect?
I do, and with today's huge hard disks, all those small files will be taking up large chunks of your disk due to this minimum allocation situation. Those 101 macros would end up taking well over 3.2 megabytes of disk space for programs that they sold on a single 360K floppy diskette.

Back to my SCSI saga. I formatted the disk and even put the system files on it to see if it would boot. No problem with that. My two IDE drives were just taking up space now so I figured that I would re-introduce them to the CMOS and possibly end up with three hard disks. I changed the CMOS to see the IDE C and D drives. Now it kept trying to boot off the SCSI hard disk and the IDE drives were not visible. What to do? I finally figured out that I had to go into the SCSI configuration program, which is on the ROM for my Adaptec controller board and which always pops up before the machine starts its boot sequence. I told it not to try to boot from any of the SCSI devices. Now, upon boot, the machine booted off the IDE drives exactly as it was supposed to. What a pleasure to finally figure that one out. A bit complicated, but the rules of engagement for SCSI and IDE (or EIDE) say that only one has primary control. If you boot off the IDE drives, the SCSI drives and devices are only available by device drivers in your CONFIG.SYS file. I am not sure how you would boot from the SCSI hard disk and be able to recognize the IDE hard disks. Probably no way. But I was happy and now all the devices were available from Windows 95.

I had the C, D, and now a 1-gigabyte E drive. F was my Zip 100 megabyte drive. G was my Pinnacle writable CD-ROM. H is the internal CD-ROM. And my network started at the I drive. Now as long as I don't find any more toys to put on the SCSI bus, I am ok.

Bottom line is that I would highly recommend that anyone with the money to spend, and with ease of installation and reliability as a high priority, go for the gold and get the SCSI controller, hard disks, CD-ROMs, and scanners. It is much easier to configure and add new devices. It is much cheaper to go with IDE/EIDE, but in a situation where you want better reliability, go for the SCSI. IDE CD-ROMs are now so cheap and easy to install, if you already only have IDE go for the IDE CD-ROM. Don't fall for the proprietary board type of CD-ROM, because it will probably be more aggravation in the long run. My recommendation would be to go 100% SCSI and not mess with IDE. If you have another opinion on all this, I am positive the editor will be glad to have your column as a regular rebuttal to
mine.<G> Hey, maybe we could have a Crossfire type of column in
 the Monitor. . . .

Turbo Tax Deluxe CD-ROM

- Source: Intuit, (800) 624-8742.
- Price: $49.95 list.

Rich Schinnell is a past president of CPCUG, BBS sysop, and retiree from the US Navy and Vitro Corporation who enjoys playing with all the new toys. He will officially be a Senior Citizen this month as he will have reached the big 60. He also enjoys learning new things and helping others to live and learn with their computers. He does a bit of consulting on the side, especially now that he is not in the CPCUG office continually bothering the staff (at least not very often). He can be reached in the evening at (301) 949-9292, Internet at
schinnel@cpcug.org, or on the MIX BBS.

Copyright 1996, by the Capital PC User Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

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