Rich's Ramblings
by Rich Schinnell
Should You Upgrade to Windows 95?
The top ten reasons to upgrade to Windows 95 (or am I dreaming?):
1. You have the money and don't know what to do with it except spend it on a new machine.
2. Your present machine has 16 megabytes of RAM, 486/66 and acres of hard disk space.
3. You are tired of the fatal errors in Windows 3.1.
4. You wish to run more programs under Windows without having to close some.
5. You have time on your hands.
6. You don't have the time to waste tuning up Windows 3.1 and you think that Windows 95 will be a panacea.
7. You are a glutton for punishment.
8. You are a techie and enjoy new exciting things.
9. You are a member of CPCUG and know that someone will help you when you run into a problem.
10. Your IBM XT just bit the dust and you want to buy a new machine and get into the 21st century.
The top 4 reasons why you might not want to upgrade to Windows 95:
1. Your present machine is fine for what you're doing.
2. It is a 386SX-16.
3. You love DOS and you don't want to learn all this GUI stuff.
4. You don't have time to mess around with the techie stuff because you have real work to do.
I have to admit some things. First I love DOS, and I feel comfortable doing a lot of things from the DOS prompt. I use a DOS text editor (IBM's Personal Editor II). I can do more with PE on a text file than people who use the Windows editors can do. For example, I have a 1,000-line ASCII text file and wish to take all the data in columns 30 through 35 and move it to column 1 for all 1000 lines. Windows Write or Notepad won't do that. I also must tell you that I use Windows 95 and it works fine for everything I like to do. I feel that it is easy, if you have a power machine and enjoy the techie part of life.
Some have recommended that I take the 12-step DOS withdrawal program, but I have resisted.
Fixing Bad Installations
I would like to reiterate here again for those who are getting into trouble with installation of new software under Windows 3.1: Make copies of your CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, WIN.INI, and SYSTEM.INI files and place them on a floppy, or copy them into a separate subdirectory on your hard disk. You will be happy if you do this and one of those wonderful install programs creates havoc with your Windows and does not allow it to run. You can then copy the .INI files back to your Windows directory and get back up.
Of course some of those install programs leave programs and data all over your hard disk with no procedure to remove them all. What a pain, and another reason to go to Windows 95. Most all the Windows 95 install programs place an uninstall program on your machine. You can go to the Control Panel, select the Install/Uninstall icon, and selectively uninstall programs. Great, and one feature that most of the Windows 95 programs have.
In fact, you can even remove Windows 95 itself, if you upgraded from Windows 3.1 and specified that you wished to save your Windows 3.1 configuration -- not if you're using a new install of Windows 95 or a pre-loaded copy from a vendor.
If you run into problems in Windows 3.1 by selecting the wrong video adapter in the setup program, you can recover by executing the program SETUP.EXE from the \WINDOWS directory. Then, from within SETUP, change the video back to standard VGA and you should be fine. This is a common mistake that some users make and Windows comes up but there isn't anything on the screen. Very discouraging.
Another hint, if you're going to try to copy your Windows to another drive, you could be in for a rude awakening as Windows keeps drive letter and path information in almost every file that it uses. I recommend that you re-install the software on another drive if you wish to move it, especially if you are using Windows 95. It is a formidable task to move programs or Windows 95 to another drive. Doing an XCOPY would prove disastrous. Please plan ahead and make sure that when you install a program, you put it on a drive with lots of space, where you think it will reside forever.
System Setup Tips
But, the day comes when you wish to upgrade your hard disk, especially with the price of hard disks coming down all the time. Don't let any vendor partition your hard disk as one big drive. (Rich's personal opinion.) A 1.2-gigabyte hard disk, when partitioned into one C drive, will give you a 32,000-byte cluster size. This translates to: every small file on your hard disk will take up a minimum of 32K regardless of its real size. A 120-byte AUTOEXEC.BAT file will take up 32K. I recommend, for a 1.2-gigabyte drive, that you create a partition of 500 megabytes for C and two 350-megabyte partitions for D and E. This will give you the smaller cluster size (8K) for better utilization of your hard disk. Creating partitions larger than 512 megabytes jumps the cluster size to 16K, and over 1 gigabyte they jump to 32K.
If you decide to try to do a tape backup of your Windows 3.1 before you install your new hard disk, you should, before you backup, go to the Windows Control Panel, select 386 Enhanced, and change the virtual memory setting for the swap file to None. This will make things much easier when you restore to the new disk. Otherwise Windows 3.1 will have serious problems initializing due to not being able to find the (Hidden) Windows swap file. I of course learned most of what little I know about Windows the hard way. I went through the aggravation of installing and reinstalling Windows several times.
Another feature of Windows 3.1 that I personally like is the ability to configure my main Program Manager window as I like it. I move the main programs that I use to a main program group for ease of use. Only the main programs are really necessary to be moved. This way, I don't have a lot of windows open. Most are closed and I think it saves on memory. I have a program group called Main Programs, where I put my executable for WordPerfect and any other programs that I use all the time. Then when I have the windows looking like I want them, I make sure that the Options on the Program Manager menu are all un-checked. Then I press Shift, Alt and F4 keys to save this configuration. Of course most of the Windows install programs take and change this, but I put everything back the way I want it and the Shift, Alt and F4 saves it back.
CD-ROM Express
I have been testing a new product called CD-ROM Express. My old friend at PC-Kwik Corporation, Bruce Schafer, sent me a copy to test for them. Back in the old days, PC-Kwik was the disk cache program of choice by many users. Their new program, CD-ROM Express, has CD-ROM caching in both Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 flavors. The bottom line on what it does is to use a portion of your hard disk for a cache for your CD-ROM. This allows many of your programs to run much faster, especially if you have an old 2x or single-speed CD-ROM. What this smart program does is to copy more commonly accessed data from your CD-ROM to a cache file on your hard disk for quicker access. If you don't have enough real estate on your hard disk now, then you're wasting your time. With the cost of 1.2-gigabyte hard disks right around $200, this should not present too much of a problem for those not on a tight budget.
If you have lots of money, then the new 12x CD-ROMs are right around the corner at the right price.
The program is pretty smart, as it has a database of some of the more popular CD-ROM titles included, and it uses this when you load one of these CD-ROMS to cache. All in all, another great product from the PC-Kwik people. As usual! Contact PC-KWIK Corp. about CD-ROM Express at (800) 274-5945. Their price is $79.95.
I hope that you take some of what I say to heart and I will leave you with the three most important words in computer talk: Backup, Backup, Backup!
Rich Schinnell is the past president of Capital PC User Group, Co-Sysop on the Members Information eXchange BBS (MIX), listed on the CPCUG HelpLine, and enjoys his volunteer work. In fact sometimes he thinks that this volunteer work is his real job. He retired from the USN and then from Vitro Corporation where he was a Senior Programmer Analyst. He doesn't sell hardware or software but enjoys looking at all the new toys! He can be reached via the Internet at schinnel@cpcug.org, or on the MIX. As a last resort, he does answer CPCUG members' computer questions at (301) 949-9292 in the evenings from 6-9 p.m.
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