               TOM'S COMPUTER NOTES FOR OCT. 1991
                                
                          Public Domain
                                
A FRIEND OF MINE ordered an IVERSON PC for his office after
spending a lot of time studying mail order ads. He said that he
picked the IVERSON because "They are a big outfit and sell mostly
to the government on big contracts so they must be good." [True].
I saw him out in front of the courthouse and asked him if the PC
had arrived and how he liked it. "Oh, it came but I sent it
back." How come? "It was too big, a real monster. It made too
much noise. It was ugly. And it kept locking up when I tried to
run a program. Maybe DOS 4.01 [which came with it] has some
bugs." I am inclined to guess that any BIGFOOT BBS user could
have fixed the IVERSON so that programs would run. The computer
probably wasn't set up properly by my friend who is not an
experienced computer user. The noise is often a problem. A number
of people have suggested to PC MAGAZINE that they tell about
noise in their equipment reviews. (They already do for dot matrix
printers.) The only noise solution (assuming you already have a
computer and you are going to keep it) is to buy a new power
supply from PC POWER AND COOLING. They are very quiet. There are
a few big name computers such as Tandy however that are not
generic enough to use this fix.

SPEAKING OF TANDY: It's been several years since I have been in a
Tandy Computer Center. Needing a battery for my DELL
clock/calendar I stopped in the Broadway store thinking I could
pick one up. The store has changed a lot. No racks of software,
cables, head cleaning kits, printer ribbons, etc., as in the
olden days. No batteries either. They suggested that I go to a
watch repair store a few doors away. They didn't suggest the
Heath Zenith store, also a few doors away. I was in a hurry so I
opted for a trip the next day to ELECTRONIC CITY at 1300 South
Park. They have EVERYTHING!

BCS has the new 3.5 inch ED disks in stock (Verbatim) at $79.90 a
box, two box minimum. Their catalog looks so much like the
MEI/MICRO catalog that I thought it was MEI with a new name. They
(like MEI) have a $3 "handling" charge but they (unlike MEI)
encourage mail-in orders by giving you a $2 discount on such
orders. Prices are just about the same as MEI as is selection of
goods. They have a 3.5 double disk converter for $29.95. Simple
arithmetic shows that you have to convert 150 DD disks to break
even. After that you are making money. Their toll free number
should you want a catalog is 1-800-544-3472.

THE NEW EPSON LQ-570 printer has become available via mail order.
Best price seen is $259.

SPOTTED A GOOD BUY (I thought) at the Price Club. A 286 with
color VGA at $699. Then I noticed that the monitor was one of
those "I wouldn't take it for free" .51 dot pitch jobs. You can
tell the dot pitch of a Packard Bell monitor from the last two
digits of the model number.... But I did get a few excellent buys
in books such as MS-DOS QuickStart from QUE for about $12 (list
is $19.95). Also, PC Magazine's Guide to 1-2-3 Ver. 2.3 for
$14.49 (list is $27.95). The first thing I tried to find in the
index was "Protection" but it wasn't there. How about "Cell
Protection"? Nope.....The north side Price Club has two DOS
books. The other one being the Microsoft Press book at $13.49
(list $24.95). Decided to look up DOSKEY in the lower priced
book. What I wanted to know wasn't there but I read, "DOSKEY has
other features which are outside the scope of this book." (I
found the missing dope on DOSKEY in PC Magazine, Sept 10th
issue).

The COMPUTER SELECT computer product data base is updated monthly
on CD-ROM disk. You can get a free demo disk (they didn't say if
the demo was floppy or CD) by calling 1-212-503-4400.

IT'S TOO BAD that DOSKEY (DOS 5.0) macros won't work when NORTON
COMMANDER is loaded. NORTON filters out DOSKEY macros with an
"Bad command or file name" error message.

MY INFORMANT at the U of A Law School tells me that Word Perfect
is "it." "Nothing else is used" she tells me." And, "I still
can't afford a computer but I use the ones at the law library for
$25 a semester... Maybe it's a year 'cause I haven't had a bill
this semester. They have Word Perfect and laser printers. We
don't even have to pay for paper." ... That has to be the bargain
of the year at $25.... She gets to use LEXIS and WESTLAW for
free, too. She ended up by saying, "When you get really stressed
out [on the Law School computer] you can switch from Word Perfect
to Black Jack..."

NOTEBOOKS - All the rage. You could buy a TOSHIBA for about $800
(no hard drive) or $1,200 with a HD. Trouble is, they don't have
VGA screens and are slow 80C88 CPU machines... As recently as
last March TANDON was advertising their LT/386sx laptop in PC
Magazine. List price was $2,499. 1MB, VGA, 1.44 drive, 40MB IDE
hard drive. But, it weighed in at almost 14 pounds. A notebook it
wasn't. TANDON told me, "The demand wasn't there for that size
machine. We slimmed it down to 6.5 pounds and kicked it up to 20
Mhz. It's now the SX20 Notebook and though we still support the
LT we don't market it anymore. List price on the new notebook is
$3,495." .... Well, the old big & sturdy computer is still
available at "discontinued model pricing" of $999 plus $19
shipping from DANMARK at 1-800-729-9000. Use it as a desktop
machine and still have some desktop space leftover.

QUATTRO PRO has a $49 "slim & trim" version out. If you are a
registered user of any Borland software you no doubt have
received the offer.

The new FOX PRO Ver. 2.0 sports a retrieval time for data in a
100,000 record table (a numeric field) of .55 seconds. That's
<point> 55, not fifty five seconds. dBase IV took 252 seconds.
Paradox took 134 seconds, (PC Magazine Oct 15, 1991).

PKLITE does a good "scrunching" job, transparent to you. It won't
compress everything. For example, it thinks that WORD.EXE (5.5)
is a WINDOWS program and refuses to process it... DIET is a lot
of fun to use. It compresses WORD but WORD has to expand to its
original size to run and that takes A LOT of time. DIET will
compress all your .WK1 and .DOC files and they (being small)
expand fast via a small TSR so it's a disk capacity saving to you
but then the files can't be browsed straight off the disk via
NORTON COMMANDER's view utility, etc. ... Not being able to view
files quickly via NORTON is one of the reasons I quit using SQZ!
in QUATTRO PRO.

COMPUTER ASSOCIATES still offers a free working model of CA-
Complete!, a multi-dimensional spreadsheet. I asked for one but
it never arrived. You can try at 1-800-645-3003.

Free DataPerfect demo disk and VHS video. 1-800-526-5156.

Free AMI PRO working model - 1-800-TRADEUP, ext. 6026.

SAW AN AD for DR DOS 6.0 ($65) but not much publicity otherwise.

GATEWAY COMPUTERS come with something I dreamed up several years
ago but never told anyone about (they stole my idea by reading my
mind - those rascals). It's their AnyKey keyboard. F-keys along
the left side and along the top too. You can re-program either
set to run macros (that you write). If it works like my idea you
could, for example, program F-1 as /FS~R to save a 1-2-3 file
with one key stroke.... OK, so I already have <Alt> <S> in my
macro library to do it, but I like the idea anyhow. They say in
their ad, "Any key can be programmed to perform any function."

HP's LX95 11 oz. palmtop ($695) is selling very well but now has
some competition in the new PSION 8 oz. "Series 3" at $425 list.
The HP is numbers oriented with 1-2-3 built-in. The PSION is text
oriented with a word processor that is compatable with MS WORD.
Runs on 2 AA cells and has a NEC V-30 chip as its CPU. You can
imagine how tiny the keyboard has to be on an 8 oz. "computer."

                             THE END
                                
