               TOM'S COMPUTER NOTES FOR APRIL 1991

                          Public Domain

IBM WILL ANNOUNCE SHORTLY that they are going out of the PC
business except for storage devices, high speed printers and 
graphic work stations. NO MORE PCs!!!! Rumor is that DELL
Computer of Austin, Texas, will take over all PC work in
progress. This follows on the heels of IBM's sale of the Office
Products Division.

TESTING LOTUS WORKS: Have you used ALPHA WORKS? Lotus bought the
program and changed the name. Sort of along the lines of
Microsoft WORKS. To me, Lotus WORKS is more intuitive, more fun
to use. <Ctrl> <L> layout (for example) is the best and quickest
layout control setup I have ever seen in any word processor on
the market. RESOURCE CONCEPTS still sells the old ALPHA WORKS
program discounted to $39.95, a good buy. They have lots of good
buys, such as Maxi Switch 84 key AT/XT keyboards for $22.50.
18009627795.

GUESS I'LL NOT be a PTI hard drive fan anymore. A few weeks after
the OMTI hard drive controller died the PTI 351 40 meg drive bit
the dust for good. Haven't decided what to replace it with yet.

SO...  Just put an old TANDON 20 meg hard card back into
service.In previous use (before Spinrite) it had been formatted
at whatever interleave it set itself up at via the old DEBUG
format routine. That, it turns out, was 5 to 1. Spinrite went to
work on it and decided that 3 to 1 was best for that
drive/controller combination. It's slower than the PTI but just
slightly. Have had to get rid of a lot of stuff (programs) that I
was accustomed to having and using though, with just 20 megs of
space.

"BOOT DISK FAILURE. Type key to Retry....."  How come I get that
message every time I boot the TANDON HARD CARD? I hit the space
bar and the boot continues, picking up at the CONFIG.SYS file.
Anything I can do other than reformatting my hard disk?

IS IT MY IMAGINATION or what? I get the impression that 1.2 meg
drives are more reliable than 1.44 drives. Quieter, too.
MAXI FORM will put 85 tracks on a 1.2 meg disk giving me 1.46
megs per disk. That's with a drive from the store at Broadway &
Kolb (CompuAd?). The most tracks I can get on one of their 1.44
drives is 82. After that the heads start loudly bouncing against
the stops.

AN IMPORTANT 1.44 disk (formatted at 1.6 megs) had a
problem.Couldn't get one particular file read. I tried PC TOOLS
6.0 DISKFIX (revive floppy). It wrecked the floppy. NO files
could be read from that point on.... Maybe the 1.6 meg format is
too much for PC TOOLS?

PKLITE GIVES WARNINGS such as "Program uses overlays.
Continue?(Y/N)". I got brave with a few programs (that gave
such warnings) and found that after being PKLITE'ed they still
worked just fine. LETTER PERFECT is an example.

TRIED WORD PERFECT's new (sort of new anyhow) RHYMER program. I
don't have any interest in rhymes but wondered if they had come
up with a snappy interface. Maybe some kind of mock Windows
thing? Nope. Very dull.

BACK WHEN I used older versions of WORD PERFECT I also used
PERFECT PAL and EXTEND-A-NAME.  WP 5.1 has pop-up menus so that
killed any need for PERFECT PAL.... 5.1 also has long file names.
But, I did recently try EXTEND-A-NAME PLUS. Well, I didn't really
try to any great extent 'cause it won't work with the latest
version of DOS.

OPTUNE 1.3 is just about like earlier versions. Still a very fast
defragmenter. Same interface and screen display. I was brave and
tried a defrag with all my TSR's loaded, including my cache
program. Not a recommended way to proceed.. OPTUNE worked without
a hitch none the less.

THE NEW MAXI FORM VER. 3.1 arrived. Just a little better than
before. Can format the new 2.8 meg disks (up to 3.2 megs) now.
So, who wants a 2.8 meg floppy disk at $19 a pop when a 1.44 meg
disk costs a buck?

LOTUS WILL send you a free working copy of AMI PRO (includes a
run time WINDOWS) if you call 1-800-831-9679. You can use it all
you want but you can't save files, spell, use the thesaurus. If
you send in the title page of your WORD PERFECT manual they will
sell you the full blown version for $129 'till April 15th.

MICROSOFT IS offering their EXCEL and WORD windows programs for
$129 to their customer list.

GET A WORKING model of GeoWorks Ensemble for $9.95 by calling 1-
800-772-0001.

THOMAS BUTTON, head of the BASIC Division at Microsoft Corp., has
recently said: "If it [pumping up BASIC's popularity] means
making a quality BASIC implementation available to all users at
little or no cost, we'll do it."  And microsoft is going to give
it away free. "It" being QUICK BASIC. A version a lot like Ver.
4.5 but lacking the capability to compile BASIC into .EXE
programs.

JUST HOOKED UP AN 85 meg SCSI drive. Report next month.

AND TO IBM and the IBM PC Division (See para. one) ---- APRIL
FOOL!!!!!

                             THE END
