January 15, 1994
Peter's Computer News, Copyright 1994
A belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you.
A new semester is just beginning at LVTI and I am getting busy. I also have started writing a weekly column for the local newspaper. Some people just don't know when to stop writing!
No hardware additions to report. The budget was blown with the last round, and prices of 486DX2-66 VL bus have not yet come down very far. In about two months, I might have one to write about. Or it may even be a 486DX4.
There are a number of pieces of software to report on, and plenty of bug reports. Lots of cruising the Internet highway and getting onto CompuServe again. Last time I left you with comments regarding Quicken 3 for Windows and the possibility of getting my wife to switch over to Microsoft Money. Well, the switch did take place.
In December, there was a free seminar put on by Microsoft and a local vendor to demonstrate Windows For Workgroups and NT. The show was to take place in Albuquerque. I could not pass up the chance and got several other instructors interested.
A school van was allocated for our trip. Tony Mares, an electronics instructor, kindly volunteered to drive us down. Four of us ended up going. I rode shotgun while Pierre (drafting) fell asleep in the back seat, and Tom (electronics) tried to watch what was going on from the middle seat. It was early in the morning and the sun was just beginning to come up.
I forgot to take the announcement sheet, but did remember that the show was at the Holiday Inn. Trouble was that there are two Holiday Inns in Albuquerque. Not to worry, Tony knows where they are.
I noticed the "Pyramid" Holiday Inn off the freeway as we passed it by. Tony said that if it was at the Pyramid, it would have said so on the brochure. We were heading for the one in town.
Pierre kindly pointed out to Tony that he had just missed the offramp for the downtown Holiday Inn as we went under an interchange. These things happen. Too bad we can't make a U-turn on the freeway.
Tony is a skilled driver and quickly gets us off the freeway and into the Holiday Inn parking lot. Not many spots to park, so I jump out and head for the lobby to make sure this is the place. They never heard of Microsoft, and non of the meeting titles on the bulletin board matched anything I was interested in. Must be at the other place.
Back into the van and we head north. Big discussions went on as to which offramp to take, but somehow we get to the Pyramid without further delays and rush into a fully packed, very large meeting hall. The speaker is already talking about Windows and there is a very bright projector displaying the computer screen he is working with. I think of how nice it would be nice to have that setup for my computer classes.
The speaker tells the audience to "please don't buy Microsoft Windows." "What!", exclaims a man sitting next to me. I had managed to scoot down towards the stage and found an empty seat. The speaker goes on. "Buy Windows For Workgroups instead." Seems that WFW has many 32 bit pieces of code in it that make it more stable. Now we know.
The rest of the presentation demonstrated the ease of making a client-server network by using WFW and NT. Sure did look easy. A nice touch was that the speaker from Microsoft was recently hired away from Novell where he was a national marketing manager! He said Novell is scared. Since I am now running NT on my own machine, these words of encouragement were song to my ears.
It was finally time for the big drawing. Lots of nice software was to be given away. Screen savers, WFW, NT, etc. I anxiously waited for my name to be called. Not yet, don't call my name for the screen saver, I want a copy of WFW.
All the screen savers were gone. Now it was my turn. More names drawn. This time it was for WFW. When is my name coming up? Then all of the WFW packages were gone. Clearly something had gone wrong.
The last name was finally called. Alas, it was not mine, nor was it any one of our group. I did manage to get a free diskette carrier and got to meet the regional Microsoft rep who promised to send me a copy of latest Help compiler. The copy I had was causing GPFs. About two weeks later the rep did come through.
Before leaving Albuquerque, we all went to lunch at a nearby eatery which Tony recommended. Not a bad lunch. Tony knows his way around there.
Next was a visit to the Egghead Software store. Tony wanted to go there and I came along to look. A copy of Microsoft Money sat there on the shelf calling out to me. There was a coupon on the front promising a $10 rebate from Microsoft. The price tag on the shelf said $12.95. Could this be true? I double checked with the saleslady and she confirmed the price. Tony, Tom and Pierre went out empty-handed, but I had my copy of Money!
On the way back, Tony gave me the details of his early adventures in the area near Las Vegas. Seems he and Tom grew up together going to a dance hall out by Villanueva. One time he and Tom had to hide down in some ditch while wild bullets rang out from the dance hall in all directions. He led an exciting life!
Back at home with the new copy of Money, it was time to switch from Quicken. Would Irene get along with this program. Quicken for Windows was a disaster, but I had worked with Money before and had more confidence.
The conversion from Quicken to Money went fairly easily. A couple of problems popped up when I imported the files out of sequence and ended up with double entries. We keep track of 12 accounts! Remember, we moved a lot.
After some initial adjustment shock, Irene has been working with Money regularly. However, just as she did not give up manual entry in journals when we went to Quicken, she was not about to give up Quicken when switching to Money. Presently, we have our account records in written journals, in Quicken 5 for DOS and in Money!
Money has been working out fairly well. At least it did not have the immediate turn off that Quicken 3 for Windows caused. There are a few quirks to be ironed out, and a few wish list items.
In Quicken, there are memorized transactions possible. A memorized transaction can be recalled to insert most of an entry for you. This is very handy with repeating transactions such as deposits of a paycheck and the like. Money goes a step further, as does Quicken for Windows. All transactions are memorized automatically!
With all transactions memorized, you can begin typing the first several letters of an entry, and a pull down menu will show any matches. Pressing enter or tab (depends how you configure it) will fill in the rest of the entry. Problem is, not all of the entries may be correct. With Quicken, a memorized transaction could be edited, but so far, I have not found how to do the equivalent with Money.
I will let you know the progress with Money in my next newsletter. For now, there is alternate occasional swearing at Quicken, or at Money. Each has good points and bad points. Money, for example, does not display a description of an expense category as does Quicken. The only thing that is very clear is that Quicken for Windows was a looser in this household.
Busted budget or not, I did manage to pay for two products by Parsons Technology. A new local computer store was advertising that they had Parsons software at discount, and I had some mailings that were of interest to me. So I went to check things out.
First item to be purchased was Announcements for Windows. This is a greetings card, poster and business card creator. Not quite as easy to use as Print Shop, but vastly more flexible and it produces much better output.
I don't want to scare you off. Print Shop is easier, but within not too many minutes or instruction, both my wife Irene, and my 9 year old daughter Alexis were using the Announcements program to make some cards.
With this success, which I got on special for only $19, I was ready for another round. In preparation of handouts and tests for my students, I often need to create drawings. The paint program that comes with Windows is ok, but it is difficult to edit. There are better programs which keep each part of a drawing as a separate object that can be manipulated and edited separately.
Word for Windows 6 has a fairly good drawing editor built in. Problem is, I only have a beta copy so far, and that one crashes quite often. Based on past experience with WinWord 2, I think there may be problems yet with the release version as well.
I have a copy of Kid Draw that does good drawings and is freeware. Problem with it is that it does not output to any format which anything else can read. Parsons has a new program called Super Sketch for Windows. Only $29 and it seems to have everything I need.
This is the beginning of a tale of two programs. One (Announcements) works flawlessly. The other has a mean streak. Super Sketch does work as advertised. That is, as long as you don't run it under Windows NT. Announcements has no trouble at all with NT.
I fired up Super Sketch and started drawing. So far so good. Save a drawing -- a bit confusing. To retain future editing capability, you need to save the drawing in Super Sketch native format. Ok, that one is easy. But to save it as something another program can handle requires a BMP or something like that.
There is an option to perform a "save as" which implies a BMP output. Is that the only output format besides native? Oh well, let's try it. Garbage out. What gives?
Finally, I figure out that there is an export option under the files menu. With that you can save the file in almost any format you can think of. I don't even want to remember all of the formats it can handle. Nice program.
So what is the problem you may say. The problem under NT shows up when you try to paste a picture into your drawing. Interestingly, it is not the actual pasting that causes the trouble, but the file selection process.
Click on the picture insert tool and click onto the workspace where you want the picture. A file manager type of listing window pops up. The window includes a small preview area for you to see what the file you are about to import looks like.
Preview one file then click on another. Suddenly you notice that several file names are still highlighted. The preview screen shows the one you currently have selected, but pervious ones did not turn off. Go ahead an insert the picture and all seems well.
All is well till you note that several of the toolbar buttons are highlighted at the same time. The highlighting starts to work in reverse. Selecting a button makes it go light instead of dark. I don't like this. Ok, so I will close the application and start over.
Double click to close and up pops another small window with nothing in it. Click to close that window and you are back to the main screen. Select close from the program pulldown menu and up comes that small window again. Now we are in a loop.
I activate the Task Manager and terminate Super Sketch. The program terminates, but running another program reports a divide by zero error. The entire Windows 16 bit subsystem has been corrupted. The only solution is to reboot. Fortunately, under NT, you do not need to reboot the computer. You only need to log off and log on again to restore the system. It is still annoying to say the least.
Problem reported to Parsons and to Microsoft. I saw similar behavior under NT with some other programs, but not to this extent.
My dealings with Parsons' tech support have mixed results. They are friendly people and did get back to my Internet message, but there the communications broke down. I am waiting for a reply to a new message. Will withhold judgment till some two way communications transpire.
Connecting to Internet gives you lots of room to explore. Much more than you can get with a set of local bulletin boards. Sure, you can call around the country to various BBSs, but then you would be needing to pay a large telephone bill.
I have gotten very used to my almost daily logins on Internet. Imagine how I felt when during the week between Christmas and New Years, a communications link to Internet broke down at Highlands University (where my account is). Of course, during that week everyone was off and it would not be repaired till the new year. And how was your Christmas?
After the New Year, the folks at Highlands U fixed the Internet problem and we were on again. There was another down time when the university computer needed to be upgraded. Two more weekends without Internet. It's back up now and I hope it stays that way for a while.
Cruising on Internet, I pick up a whole lot of programs. Some are shareware and some are freeware. The college also bought two books on computers. Each book came with disks of software. I spent some time looking over the Windows software that came with Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets.
The lot of shareware that came with the book is a bit dated, but I was able to sample the programs and then got updated versions from Internet. I did not get updates to all of them. Some are not that useful. A number of them provide "features" for Windows 3.0 which version 3.1 already has built in. Other programs were kind of drab.
I will share with you some of the more interesting ones I have found. Also, there were a number of shareware programs that had equivalent free versions. In some cases, the free programs were even better.
Windows File Manager provides Drag and Drop capability. This means that you can highlight a file and drag it to some other destination. You can move and copy files this way within the File Manager. In addition to this, you can drag and drop the files onto other programs that have drop capability. I spent some time evaluating a number of Drag and Drop shareware and free programs.
If you want to delete a file in File Manager, you may simply hit the delete key. But then you have to answer OK to a couple of pop up windows before the job is done. This may be a good safety feature, but can get annoying at times. Fortunately there is a better way.
The Apple Macintosh has a trashcan symbol onto which you drop the files you wish to erase. If you look even casually, you will find a plethora of trashcan programs for Windows. There are so many of them out there, that it is quite a task to evaluate them all. Actually, why not just grab one that works and use it? That is probably a sensible thing to do, but I could not help myself. I had to find the best one! I will save you the labor and tell you what I found.
I did not go through all of the programs I found on BBSs and Internet, but I did check out 8 from Internet, one from Windows Secrets, and two three from BBSs. Some were crude, some were fancy. Most followed the look of a large metal trash can. A couple used a wastepaper basket symbol. One had a red box that represented I am not sure what. There was also a shredder and a toilet bowl.
After trying the 12 programs, I narrowed the field down to four, with one designed for Windows NT. The NT program is called FILEEAT.ZIP and contains the MUELL.EXE program. The German author asks for $20. It uses a colorful wastepaper basket or a toilet bowl, your choice.
The remaining three choices are for regular Windows. Choosing among the three is a tradeoff of features and price. All use a "conventional" metal trashcan symbol. TRASHMAN.ZIP by Check Box Software costs $25 + $4 s/h. It saves deleted files to a hidden directory and allows for restoration to the original location.
Next in line is TRASHCAN.ZIP by Trigon Software, Germany. Cost is $15 and it too saves files to a hidden directory and allows restoration. It looks very much like TRASHMAN, but its icon is not quite as attractive (my opinion).
The one I settled on myself is THETRASH.ZIP but contains a file TRASHCAN.EXE as the program. It optionally saves deleted files to a directory named TRASHCAN (or name your own). It does not restore automatically, but you can copy the files manually from the TRASHCAN directory. Not as convenient a restore, but the program is much smaller in size and in price. It is FREE! Thanks to Andy Wilks for his contribution. He only asks "if you like it, please be kind to animals."
Have you ever used File Manager to browse a list of files and decide that you wanted to view it? I have, but even the improved File Manager in NT and WFW does not include a view option. There are a number of replacement programs such as Central Point's PC Tools for Windows and Xtree for Windows, but I find the File Manager to be far cleaner to use. Besides, the replacements are not available for NT.
I found a very nice solution in Canyon Software's program Drag and View. The program installs itself as a fixed icon on your des ktop. You may drag a file from file manager and drop it onto the icon. A window pops up and displays the contents of the file. Drag and View includes a variety of viewers. It determines the appropriate viewer to use and displays the file. There is support for database, spreadsheet, word processor, graphics and binary files. It does not support the newer word processor files such as WinWord 6 or WP 6 yet. Price is $25 for the shareware version and $35 for a non-shareware professional version. The pro version includes additional file viewers.
A brother (or sister) to Drag and View is Drag and Zip. This package is actually two programs. One is a ZIP file viewer and extractor, while the other is a file zipper. It is actually a front end for PK Ware's PKZIP programs. Activation of the unzipper/viewer is most conveniently done through file association in the file manager. The zip portion works similarly to Drag and View. An icon appears on your desktop and you drag the files to be zipped onto this icon. Price of the package is $25, but if purchased with Drag and View, it is $40 for both. With Drag and View pro it is $50 for both.
The only problem with Drag and View and Drag and Zip that I have found is that invoking PKZIP in a batch file can sometimes be slow. Under NT, it does not close the DOS window when the PKZIP job is done.
If you work a lot with ZIP files, you may also want to look at WINZIP50 by Nico Mak. This program can act as a front end for PKZIP, but it does not need to. It has compression and extraction routines built in. Operation is very similar to Drag and Zip, but it is a single program instead of two. It also has built in text file viewing capability. In practice, operation of WinZip is much like the Drag and Zip viewer, but WinZip works much faster due to its built in decompression. However, there are some quirks in the creation of ZIP files with WinZip. It does not like to accept a group of ZIP files to be zipped together into another ZIP file. Price is $29.
Although WinZip is very nice, there is a cheaper alternative. A package called Info ZIP is available as WIZUNZ (earlier) or WUNZ20.ZIP (newer). This program was written by a large collection of authors coordinated by some UCLA students. It works very much like WinZip, but does not have quite the same polish. However, the price is FREE.
Last item to mention is a wonderful program called DeZkTop. The file I go is DZK16C.ZIP dated 9-3- 93. This neat package works on Windows as well as NT. It is a program manager addition or even a replacement. It allows nesting of program groups as well as placing program icons right on the desktop Mac style. Similar to what Norton Desktop gives you, but it seems to work better. Price is 10 pounds sterling to the English author, John Rennie. Definitely worth checking out. If you can wait for Windows 4 (Chicago) to arrive later this year, then you don't need DeZkTop. But if you can't wait, DeZkTop can give you an early start.
Peter's Computer News - Vol 2 No 1 January 15, 1994