Well another year has gone by and here we sit, only two years away from the magical moment in time when the Y2K problem will, according to some, destroy all of our data< G>. It should be an interesting time when all of our computers turn over from 12/31/1999 to 1/1/2000. Hopefully most of us will hardly notice the difference except when we write checks. This event even more brings out my three favorite words. BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP. Please do it and often.

Another in the long chain of trials and tribulations from Rich: In late November after returning from COMDEX I received a package in the mail which turned out to be a freebie from the Walnut Creek CD-ROM people. After opening it, I was kind of thrilled that they would send me their product Free BSD. It comes on four CD-ROMS and is a UNIX like operating system. It retails for about $39.95 but believe me it is not for the faint of heart <G>
As usual, I like to give some of these things a shot and now I am even more happy that I use the removable Mobil Racks to mount my hard disks in. They are really a godsend as I have several removable C drives using them. They fit in the front of your computer case taking up a 5 1/4" bay. They include a removable cartridge that holds any standard hard disk. I read what I could of the documentation, installed a new 540Megabyte hard disk in a cartridge and booted the pentium pro with a floppy with all the cdrom drivers. I am sure happy that I did not try to install this BSD system on one of my production hard disks. I guess I am not as much as techi as others because I never could get it installed. I tried several times and I finally ended up doing a low level format of the Seagate hard disk. For some reason, I could not remember each of the Hexadecimal address's or the Interrupt numbers for all the devices on my system. And to top it all off, I could not get DOS 6.22s FDISK to delete the partitions that BSD had created on the hard disk. This BSD operating systems is for the real techis and those with a passion for self flagellation or whatever it's called. Gluttons for punishment will probably love this operating system, but it reminds me of Linux and other Unix clones. If your not into the hexadecimal world, then stick with Windows 95 or whatever your using already. I would bet that the BSD operating system is great and would probably be the best thing since sliced bread, but not for the masses. Techi's, please do not send me hate mail<G> If your one of those that enjoys pain, then the Free BSD system is available from Walnut Creek CD-ROM people for $39.95 at (510) 674-0783. Or if your the first person to give me a voice call and asks for the cdroms, you get this copy for free. I guess that I am not one destined to use Unix or any flavor of such.
As an aside, the only person that I know of that is a Unix person that speaks in regular english is David Lerner who actually speaks so that non Unix heads can understand him.< G> David is the volunteer who set-up the MIX internet mail Linux box to interface the MIX's net mail conference with the internet.

I said that I would report on COMDEX (Computer Dealers Exposition) in Las Vegas in November 1997. I was thankful that the Slot Machine gods were good to me this time and I actually brought back more money than I took. That's an improvement on past forays to Las Vegas. There were so many people at COMDEX this time that your feet sometimes did not touch the floor, you were just swept along with the crowds. For those that suffer from cluster phobia, you would not like this year. Over 250,000 people jammed the main convention center and the Sands convention center in Las Vegas. Wall to Wall people and lots of noise. I had a very difficult time seeing the products that I was interested in. It is just getting much too big and glitzy. I did like seeing the huge flat screen monitors, like a 40 inch wall mounted monitor. But of course the price is out of most peoples range and not for sale yet according to the vendor who was demonstrating them. I would guess that you could buy a Mercedes for the same price<G> DVDs were everywhere and the quality of the video and sound were fantastic.

I had purchased one of the new Sony Mavica digital cameras in early October and was surprised that Sony was just showing it at COMDEX. It is the only digital camera that writes the digital images to a standard 1.44Megabyte 3 «" floppy diskette. Great idea as the only people that I know of that don't have their share of AOL diskettes are those that don't have a mailing address. The files that are created in the high resolution mode (640x480x256) are about 50-60Kbytes in size. The lower resolution of 128 colors takes up less space, of course. I get about 20-25 high resolution pictures on a diskette and the lithium battery seems to last forever. It is rechargeable and I would guess that unless you used the flash a lot, it should last a couple of days of intermittent use. The camera retails for $499 at Compusa and other fine stores. There are two models of the Sony Mavica, the one I have does not have the 10:1 zoom included with the more expensive model that costs $699. I felt that I would not need the zoom feature, so opted for the cheaper one. Both use the same recording media of the floppy diskettes. One neat thing is that the camera will format a diskette if you put in one that is not already formatted. So it must have some version of DOS in the electronics. What a marvel and one of the best toys that I have picked up lately.

Another product that I received free while at COMDEX (from our old friend ex-IBM'er Gene Barlow who is the User Group person for Power Quest)., Drive Image, A real neat program. I have one of my machines whose hard disk as C was only about 540 Megs. I felt that it was time to move all that stuff to a larger drive (Don't we all have that problem>). I had a 1.2 gigabyte that wasn't doing much, following the directions in the book I proceeded to make an image of my C drive on a SCSI hard disk I have attached to my system. (Power Quest, who makes Partition Magic as well as Drive Image has pretty good documentation). The image of the 540 meg C drive took up about 450Megs on my SCSI hard disk. I then made up the recommended floppies to be able to boot my system including the SCSI drivers for my other hard disks and CD-ROM drives. This is very important if you wish to get to the image and it is not on another attached hard disk. I then removed the existing C drive, installed the new 1.2 gigabyte hard disk. Booting the first of the two new Drive Image disks put me at the A prompt and I proceeded to remove the exisiting partitions on the new hard drive. After re-booting again. I then executed the PQDI program from the second disk, located the image file on the SCSI hard disk (BTW, I could have placed it on a ZIP disk or heaven forbid, on floppies). I chose the option in Drive Image to increase the partition size when it reinstalled the image from my old C drive. It worked like a charm. When the system re-booted, all was as normal as apple pie and thanksgiving. Except, I now had about 600Megabytes more free space on the disk instead of 55Megs. Drive Image works, but one thing you must remember, It does not allow you to put the image on another hard disk without enough free space, then flipping floppies is the answer. As with all of these types of programs if you don't follow the directions, you are destined to be completely frustrated. I was, until I decided to read the directions. RTFM (Read The Fine Manual) is really a good idea in this case.
Drive Image by Power Quest.
$69.95 (check with CompUSA and other fine stores for the street price) Http://www.powerquest.com
(800) 379-2566

Rich's Recommendation: If you have to upgrade or increase the size of your hard disk, Drive Image is a program that works. There is a professional version for those that need this in a business environment where you wish to make lots of machines identical. Training machines are a good target for Drive Image. I would have gladly paid for the program if I had known it was so easy and worked so well. This program is NOT for the novice who doesn't read directions<G>

Rich Schinnell is retired from the USN, Vitro Corporation and has a few small business's as clients who expect him to keep their systems running smoothly. Most times he succeeds. Rich is known for his help line expertise and enjoys helping others understand and use computers to make their life easier rather than more complicated. He can be reached via e-mail at schinnel@cpcug.org or the land line at (301) 949-9292 evenings from 6-9PM. He has his ego WWW page at http://www.cpcug.org/user/schinnel. Rich is also the 1st vice president of Capital
PC User Group. He has been writing a column in the Monitor for almost too long <G>

http://www.cpcug.org/user/schinnel

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