Rich's Ramblings
by Rich Schinnell
I hope the last two month's columns on XCOPY and backing up did not confuse you too much. There was a bit of confusion between July and August as some of it was written with the XCOPY command involved. But If you backup on a regular basis then you don t have to read my columns and get confused <G> I promise not to mention XCOPY for the next few months.
I followed my own advice about not buying updates from WordPerfect (now Corel) as I used to and then end up finding the upgrades for a cheaper price locally. I saw an advertisement from Egghead Software for the Windows95 version of WordPerfect 7.0 suite and jumped at the $99.97 price. Sorry Rich, you messed up again as the following week ComPUSA had it for $89.95 the following Sunday. But true to form, Egghead credited me with the $10 difference in price. Many of the stores do that if you bring the advertisement in and your bill of sale. They are to be commended for matching prices.
Some tidbit, I heard on the grapevine that IOMEGA will be slashing the price on their ZIP drives to below $100 from $199. (They have a $50 rebate in place as of July 9th, Nice move and one sure to cut a swath thru their competition on price. Even though their 100 Megabyte ZIP drives are the best around, for my money. I have the parallel port and SCSI versions, I would not be without my portable when I go to a clients site to install a replacement hard disk. I see where the IOMEGA 1Gigabyte JAZ drives have come down to below $400 for the internal. Great little drive and that's my next purchase. The JAZ drive is only connected via an SCSI adapter board. With the 1 Gigabyte cartridges running less than $100, it is also a great backup device. Pick up an Adaptec 15xx controller card for around $150 (or IOMEGA's SCSI board for $115) and with the EZ-SCSI utilities from Adaptec, you will be in business to effectively have a portable 1 Gigabyte random access hard disk. (As you can tell, I am partial to Adaptec) Many machines have a spare ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) slot. That means an AT type 16 bit slot in your computers motherboard. I wrote about the EZ-SCSI 4.0C utilities in a review in the July 96 Monitor. I bought the external version for $499 from Best Buy and it's installation on two machines was as easy as it was with the parallel port version of the ZIP drive. Fast and easy. A great product.
Harangue #2 from Rich
PLEASE!, everyone stop what you're doing and go to your computer. Place a blank diskette in your A drive and create a rescue boot disk. PLEASE!
Also if you are using any of the special programs like On-Track's Disk Manager for your older machines to be able to recognize large hard disks. Copy that driver to your A drive disk and add a config.sys line for your driver. See what is in your present C:\CONFIG.SYS file to make one for your A drive rescue disk. This diskette will prove very valuable for that day when you receive the dreaded message Place a disk in drive A to boot or No operating system available . Any of these can ruin your whole day unless your prepared. Sometimes programs delete the COMMAND.COM from your hard disk or you inadvertently placed it in the trash via the windows file manager. And while your at it, never type DEL .. (that s two periods.) That removes all the files in the parent directory to where you are located. If you were in the C:\WINDOWS directory when you typed that, all the files in your root directory would be removed.
Now that some your machines are reaching the 3-6 year age, you might think about writing down the hard disk parameters from your CMOS settings. This way, when your battery decides to die, you will be able to pick up a new battery and reset the CMOS hard disk settings and be back in operation.
I still use Windows 3.1 on many machines and still get tired of installing new programs which when they install, save the screen settings with their window right over the top of my preferred settings. Change the screen to what you like, press Shift+ALT and Press F-4 key to save the settings of the windows. Make sure that the boxes are not checked in the Options pull down menu. I don t like that feature on most installation programs.
Reminds me of the install programs that make changes to your AUTOEXEC.BAT and Config.sys files without your knowledge. Or even the worse one is the install program that forces you to re-boot after completion. Good thing for the F5 key in DOS to bypass all the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. Some install programs put their drivers at the top of the CONFIG.SYS file, virtually destroying your upper memory plans. The F5 key will save you from two or three re-boots to get everything correct. Check out the CONFIG.SYS file after every installation. Same with the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Some will keep putting the line:
PATH=C:\NEWPGM;%PATH%
into your AUTOEXEC.BAT file and eventually your will get enough of these to run out of environment space for the path. Bad idea which should be discouraged. There needs to be only one PATH= statement in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. You control it and as an aside, some people are under the mistaken impression that they need every sub directory on their hard disk, referred to in their path. Not necessary. Only put the path s for programs that need it. Otherwise, use a batch file for this sort of thing.
A trick to save your existing path to a file and then to reset it to what it was before.
PATH >OLDPATH.BAT
This will put the line
PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\DOS....
ETCETRA
into the file named
OLDPATH.BAT
Neat way of saving information about your path and then when you want to restore your path to what it was before some install program changed it. Type
OLDPATH
this will reset your path to what it was before.
I have had members call me up regarding my columns and wish to encourage others to call and let me know what you think. It is really a rewarding experience to answer the phone and help a member with a problem. Many of them call me back to thank me for the advice. I suggest that if you have been helped by a HelpLine volunteer, give them a call and let them know that their advice worked and thank em. We have lots of great volunteers on the Help Line for CPCUG and some help people quite often. Many times they never hear back on whether the advice worked.
Correction for my July 96 column: Paragraph 5 hard disk lettering scheme was confusing because I messed it up when I sent it to the editor. It is easy to get confused as you get older <G>
It should have been:
Hard disk #1 #2
C D
E H
F I
G J
Hope this clears up that little mystery.
Rich Schinnnell is the program director for CPCUG, retired from
the USN and Vitro Corp. He really does enjoy helping people. He
has been an active volunteer (sometimes too active) for CPCUG
since it was formed back in 1982. He runs a BBS that has been
online almost as long. He can be reached via E-Mail at
schinnel@cpcug.org or via phone in the
evening at (301) 949-9292
6-9PM only.
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