                TOM'S COMPUTER NOTES FOR FEB 1991

                          Public Domain

GOT THE ATI BASIC VGA card ($75) and the LEADING TECHNOLOGY 1230V
mono monitor. An easy job to get that combo up and running. A few
more things (games, etc.) I can now run. I don't find the display
very easy on the eyes. My old amber hercules monitor was
better.... Most programs work OK. NORTON COMMANDER isn't as nice
to use as you can't differentiate between selected and non-
selected files, ie., the BOLD and regular screen portrayal of a
file name is too much alike to let you see the difference. Other
programs don't have this problem.... Underlined text in Word
Perfect isn't underlined anymore. It's blocked out instead. Bold
is blocked out too but I have the block displayed in a different
shade.

WHEN USING THE SPELL feature of Word Perfect (with the mono VGA
monitor) the cursor completely disappears. So, I don't know which
word on the screen is incorrectly spelled. Any suggestions?
Update: I called Word Perfect, first time I have ever called
their tech support. They wanted to help but I had to be at my
computer and in the setup menu while talking to them. I was at
work... Went home and worked with SETUP/DISPLAY/COLORS and fixed
the problem. Play around with the BLOCK foreground and background
colors if you have the problem.

THE HARD DRIVE CRASHED AGAIN. This time it was sort of easy to
figure out what was wrong. I booted and got the dread message,
"Boot Failure." Booted off a floppy and no drive C: to be found.
I had noticed that the hard drive didn't even try to get up and
running. No little green light. And, SPINRITE II told me (during
its diagnostics test) that my HD driver card was bad. Well,
that's not too expensive to replace. Ordered a new SEAGATE 8-bit
MFM card and got it two days later. Popped it in and it didn't
get me back in business..... On top of that, with it plugged into
a slot my floppy drives wouldn't work either. Maybe it's a bad
card? Took it to work and put it in an old XT with a 20 meg
SEAGATE ST-225. It wouldn't work but at least it gave me a
message, "REFORMAT NEEDED NOW. OK TO START REFORMAT?" or
something like that. No, I didn't want to reformat. I took the
card back home and played with it some more, switching jumpers,
etc. Nothing. Then, all of a sudden (I don't know what I did to
get this result) it came up with the REFORMAT message. So, I let
it reformat. (Didn't need to use DEBUG to do the low level
format, the routine is built into the card's ROM) Then FDISK and
finally FORMAT.COM. Then, restoring all the files. What a pain.
So, the old idea I had that any MFM card would run any MFM drive
is only partly correct. It will do it (in my case at least) only
after a complete reformat.

MY DISK DRIVE is much slower with the new SEAGATE ST11M
controller card. Also, SPINRITE sez that 3 to one interleave is
the best I can do. The OMTI controller card let me set the
interleave at 1 to 1. Put a CACHE program to work and things were
much better. With the old 1 to 1 OMTI card driving the PTI hard
disk a cache program didn't make that much difference. It's a
must have now.

PC TOOLS cache works OK except- Word Perfects spell checker locks
up after checking about 10 words. I determined that PC TOOLS was
the culprit by deleting PC CACHE from my AUTOEXEC file and
finding that spell check worked without hanging. I switched to
PCKWIK and it worked OK except it choked on floppies. Could only
use it with my hard drive, ie., I had to disable floppy caching.

WHILE I WAS waiting for the new controller card to arrive I ran
an old TANDON 20 meg hard card in the computer. It was
interesting to see the antique programs on that drive, which had
been sitting in a desk drawer for several years. Word Perfect
4.2, etc. Funny thing though, every time I booted I got the
message, "Boot Disk Failure. Type key to retry." I hit the space
key and the computer booted OK. Every time. Anyone seen that
before?

I'M LOOKING AT A 20MHz AT (286) computer. Seems to be the most
for the money (under $700). I figure to add a PLUS HARD CARD
(19ms) drive which has a built-in 64K cache. I should be able to
run 4 or 5 CAROUSEL partitions without buying any more memory,
just using the fast hard drive for storage.

TEST RESULTS: Took an .EXE file 74944K and ran it through LZEXE
which resulted in a file 33945K in length. Then I ran the same
file through the new PKLITE Ver. 1.0 which gave me a file 34622K
in length. At least PKLITE gives its messages in English.

THIS MONTHS BARGAINS: EPSON EQUITY 1+ mono system, $328, United
Computer (NYC).... PTI 42 meg. hard drive (bare), $185, DC
DRIVES.... 

POQUET pocket PCs are selling for half price (various dealers).
Is the company in trouble.

NEXT MONTH: Report on various shareware cache programs.

                             THE END
