              TOMS COMPUTER NOTES FOR JANUARY 1991

                          Public Domain

STRANGE LITTLE THINGS with Word Perfect. Such as: An error
message CAN'T FIND WP.FIL... That's strange, I put a copy of
WP.FIL everywhere, ie., ROOT, WP51, FILES, etc. And, the spell
checker kept crashing. Last months NOTES for example; every time
the spell check got to "MAC" (as in Apple MAC) the machine froze
up solid. I played with things for a while and found out that
deleting PC-TOOLS Version 6.0 PC-CACHE from AUTOEXEC.BAT slowed
down operations but fixed my Word Perfect problems.... When I
went back to Version 4.11 of PC-CACHE all was well again....
Scratch that, it caused problems too... Then I went to the Super
PC-Kwik cache. No problems (yet)... People are telling me that
they stayed with Word Perfect 4.2 because of problems with their
machine freezing up. I can believe it. Well, I just make darn
sure that I save my work immediately before any spell check is
done.... Running INFO SELECT in a different CAROUSEL partition
(with POPDROP first and POPDROP STOP after) seems to precede my
CAN'T FIND WP.FIL problems.... Had to get rid of PC-Kwit too...

WANT TO USE WORD PERFECT on your laptop but don't want to buy
LETTER PERFECT (the compact version of WP)? If you have a 720K
drive you can get WP 5.0 on a single floppy. Of course, it's
nothing fancy, no extras such as spelling, etc. I have WP 5.1 on
a floppy but I need a 1.44 for it. Even after I compressed WP.EXE
with LZEXE the required files took 777K on the floppy. The files
needed are these three: WP{WP}.SET, WP.EXE and WP.FIL.

REMEMBER THE ZENITH E-Z computer? Sort of a cross between a PC-
Jr, a PS/1 and a TI. Saw it being remaindered in COMPUTER SHOPPER
for $299. It comes with a "paper white CGA compatible monitor."
Sounds neat doesn't it?

THE ACER COMPUTER arrived from DANMARK. Not a bad little machine.
Like an IBM Model 30 I guess. A little ATish such as SETUP in
ROM. Built in HD floppy controller. The advertised built in IDE
HD controller didn't exist as far as I could tell. Oh, there was
a hard drive controller (poorly described in the small manual)
but it seemed to be for an ST-225 type drive. I stuck a hard card
in one of the slots but the computer wouldn't recognize it.
Biggest problem was the lack of a VGA display as per the ad. It
came with a mono (white) MCGA display. So, back to DANMARK it
went. I'll let you know if I have any trouble getting my money
back.

GOT MY FALL RELEASE of PC TAX CUT... Nice program. Glad I
switched from TURBOTAX this year. It read in all my files from
last year's TURBOTAX though not without a few problems, ie., it's
unable to read in depreciation schedules plus a few other forms. 
Doing a TURBOTAX to PC TAX CUT conversion is about the only thing
that the manual is needed for. Actually, I think you might be
able to do it via the menus but I'm not sure and I don't want to
go through it again just to find out..... Depreciation and a few
other things will have to be entered by hand. As PC TAX CUT reads
in the TURBOTAX file (TAXDATA1.89F) an "exception report" is sent
to the printer so you know about anything that has been missed,
that is, that PC-TAXCUT isn't able to translate. 

PC CONNECTION got my copy of PC TAX CUT to me overnight via
FEDERAL EXPRESS. All the way from New Hampshire (unless they have
a west coast warehouse?) What gets me is that I can order a
discounted brand new package via PC CONNECTION for the same price
as MECCA will sell me an upgrade from last year. And, MECCA sure
won't get it to me overnight.

360K disk drive out and 1.2 meg in... There is a problem and here
is what it is: I format 360K disks at work. Bring them home and
use COPYAT2PC to put data on them. Then back to work to the old
XT. It doesn't want to read the 360K disks written to in the 1.2
meg drive.... CPYAT2PC is supposed to fix that. I'll have to play
around with the FORM FACTOR switch and see what I can come up
with.... Some friends of mine sent me a data disk full of text
files. In my 1.2 drive the disk acted just like a disk that had
never been formatted. No data at all. Lucky thing I didn't
reformat it as the data was actually all there. I sent it up to
North Dakota with a note, "All the data is gone." The fellow up
there could read it OK. He copied it to a 1.2 meg disk, sent it
to me and it's printing out now as I'm typing this. He commented,
"There must be something wrong with your 1.2 meg drive that it
can't read 360K disks." Well, it seems to read them OK except for
that one particular one. I have installed a lot of commercial
software (from 360K disks) since installing the 1.2 meg drive,
software such as PC TAX CUT on three 360K floppies. So, it's a
mystery.... I downloaded from CompuServe (IBMHW Forum) a program
called FORM360.EXE which is supposed to format disks in an XT
that will be usable in an AT (usually no problem) and the other
way around. I'll upload it here if it works out. Heard about
another program supposed to do the same thing called EZFORMAT but
haven't found it anywhere.

GUESS IT'S BEEN ABOUT a year now that I have been formatting 720K
disks to 1.66 megs..... Haven't lost any data yet. So take that
Peter Norton (who said, "Don't ever do it."

                             THE END

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