TOM'S COMPUTER NOTES FOR MAY 1991

Public Domain

OUT WITH the old hard drive and in with the new SEAGATE 85meg
SCSI. Easy job but (of course) it took me 3-4 hours to get it
running right. First there was a conflict with one of my cards
for "who gets the memory." I could use my new drive or I could
use expanded memory but not both at the same time. Got that
solved and there was a conflict with my floppy controller card.
The SCSI interface card and the floppy controller card fighting
for the same memory. It took a lot of playing with CONFIG.SYS and
jumpers on the cards. All of a sudden I had everything working!
What combination had finally worked? I don't know and I don't
care. I just put the case back on the computer and kept my
fingers crossed. It's been working for a month now so I guess I'm
OK.  P.S. - SPINRITE II won't do a low level format or set
interleave on SCSI drives.

CAROUSEL Ver. 5.0 arrived. I had skipped Ver. 4.0 so can only
compare 5 to 3.0 and it's a bit of an improvement. CAROUSEL has
always been (in my experience) the most crash proof program in
existence. Still is..... Installation didn't go too smoothly....
Had to do a lot of tweaking to get it right. The manual sez that
CAROUSEL isn't copy protected but SoftLogic has done something to
it because I copied all the files from the two 3.5 inch masters
to a 1.2 floppy and then tried to INSTALL but the message "not
original master disk -installation aborted" kept coming up on the
screen.

THERE IT GOES AGAIN- Right after going to the paragraph above to
insert the extra periods in the paragraph above (following "Still
is") I tried to SAVE (I'm in WP 5.1) and I got the error message
CAN'T FIND WP.FIL. When you get that message you are out of luck.
Can't even QUIT Word Perfect. You have to reboot. Or, popup the
CAROUSEL menu screen and use "Kill a [running] Program." So, you
lose any work not saved. I'm in the habit of saving (via <Alt>
<S> macro) at the end of every paragraph. Think I'll put WP51 in
my PATH and see if that does any good. (It didn't).s

BORLAND SURE KNOWS how to get money out of me. Yet another
QUATTRO PRO upgrade, Version 3.0.... I wonder why SPRINT never
had an upgrade? --- Stephen Manes calls SPRINT "the late,
unlamented SPRINT" in this months issue of PC COMPUTING.

CALLED GIBSON RESEARCH to inquire about the possibility of a
version of SPINRITE being released for SCSI drives. The tech
support division told me, "We already have a version for SCSI
drives. The standard version. It just won't low level format. It
does everything else." ... "Pardon me? It 'just' won't low level
format? That's what I bought SPINRITE for." ... They said, "At
some point in time we will address that problem - for SCSI
drives." I'll be holding my breath waiting for that....

I GAVE TEXTRA 6.0 some hard knocks a few months back. Tried it
again and it's looking better. Actually, quite good for a $99
program. What got me to working with it again follows:

WORD PERFECT GAVE ME some tips for beating the "Can't find
WP.FIL" blues. They were: Load with the /32 and/or /NE options. I
have tried /NE before with no result and /32 was a new one on me.
Someone else suggested turning OFF the timed backup option in
SETUP. Will let you know next month if anything helped. I also
found out that WP doesn't like hardly any memory manager BUT
386MAX. The WP speller still hangs from time to time, about 4
words into a document. Requires me to re-boot. I tried running WP
with no TSR's, cache, etc., but it still hangs. The only thing to
do for spell checking "problem" files is EXIT and spell check in
TEXTRA, which has a better spell checker anyhow. TEXTRA 6.0 will
read/write WP 5.1 files as its "native" file format if you set
that option.

LATE NOTE: I finished the Notes with the above paragraph and then
tried to spell check the file. Got a "please wait" message that
was permanent, with a hung computer. I'm over in TEXTRA finishing
this now.....

THE END


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