Display article   Subject:  January 1992
   04/30/97   19:59:04


TANDY USER GROUP NEWSLETTER........................JANUARY 1992

Material contained herein may be reproduced in whole or in part
in user group newsletters.  Please quote source as Tandy
Corporation/Radio Shack.  The company cannot be responsible
for inaccuracies or for information which changes prior to or
after publication.

Send questions/suggestions to:  Ed Juge, Director of Market
Planning, Radio Shack, 700 One Tandy Center, Fort Worth, TX
76102.



More Questions

The mail has been active this month, thank you very much!  Your
questions make my job of writing this newsletter so very much
easier.  I don't have to try and guess what is of interest, or
discuss some subject near and dear to me personally.  So, any
time you feel you have a question that will be of general
interest... send it in.

A letter came in this week from a reader asking, among other
things, about a directory he couldn't seem to kill from the DOS
prompt.  I've seen a few of those, too.  Usually, it's because
some application program, during installation, put a hidden file
in that directory.  It looks empty, but isn't... and therefore
can't be removed.

Most of you "seasoned" PC users have just the way around that.
For those who don't, I strongly suggest one of the utility
programs by Mace, Norton, PC Tools or XTREE.  (Listed
alphabetically.  Others please forgive me if I left you out.)

These invaluable utilities will find hidden files and much more.
Every computer user who does more than load and use applications
programs should have one in his or her bag of tricks.

When you ask a computer guru which one to use, you'll find little
consensus of opinion.  Everyone has a favorite.

I've used Norton and PC Tools, and watched a friend use XTREE
Gold extensively.  You tend to get used to the way a particular
utility works, and stick with it.  Like many types of programs,
the ones you aren't used to will seem difficult to use.


Utility Programs:  What Do They Offer?

For example -- and bear in mind there are some differences between
the brands -- there are utilities that will optimize your system
... defragment hard disks and adjust interleaving for maximum
performance.  There are hard and floppy disk formatters, many that
do their job so, if necessary, you can recover the data on an
accidentally formatted disk.

There are data recovery routines that recover damaged or
accidentally killed files.  Some offer data security routines
that will encrypt your data, and "shread" killed files so they
absolutely can't be recovered.

Most include their own fast backup routines with all kinds of
bells and whistles.

There are also routines for preventative maintenance ... routines
that will check your hard disk for potentially bad sectors before
an error happens, and check and repair file allocation tables,
directories, and more.  Frequently, you can repair a bad disk
(hard or floppy) and recover the data on it.

Most of these packages allow renaming of directories or files.
Some will let you choose a directory branch -- including all its
files and sub-directories -- and move it to another location on
the disk ("prune and graft").  You can change file attributes
(change hidden to visible files or make files "read only" and
more).

Some of these packages include a "User Shell" and some include
system performance benchmarks so you can see how fast (or slow)
your system runs.  Norton Utilities includes a file finder which
will search your disks to find misplaced files.

Norton Desktop for Windows is a program manager which includes
many of the functions of the Norton Utilities plus powerful and
comprehensive file management utilities, like moving a file by
click-and-drag.

You can even search files on all of your disks to see if any of
them contain a specified text string (inside the file.)  In case,
while you're trying to clear out some outdated files, you can't
remember what's in a particular file, most of these utilities
have a file viewer capability so you can look inside the file
without calling up your word processor or spreadsheet.

Careful, Please!

If you aren't familiar with doing this type of work on computers
and disks, be very careful.

Before you start poking around in your disk files, make sure
everything is backed up!  You can put yourself out of business
quickly with one of these packages, but used carefully, it can
also save your life. The best bet is to start out slowly, and
learn your utility thoroughly as you go, one feature at a time.
It's easier to stay out of trouble that way.

There are only two kinds of computer users:  Those who have
accidentally deleted or lost a file... and those who will!

There will come a time when one of these packages will save you
hours...days...maybe even weeks of work!


What Happened to "Getting the Most Out of DeskMate?"

Great book by an excellent author.  It simply didn't reflect the
new DeskMate and DeskMate Home Organizer software that started
with the Tandy 1000 RL and RLX computers and is now available as
a stand-alone package.

Why don't you make DeskMate "more graphical" like GeoWorks?

DeskMate is a graphical user interface.  Every character you see
on the DeskMate screen is generated in graphics mode.

What DeskMate is NOT, and GeoWorks is, is an icon-based interface.
THE icon-based interface is unquestionably Microsoft Windows 3.0.
It has achieved such wide acceptance that any competing interface
will have a rough time finding adequate software support.  And
software support is critical to the success of any such product.

GeoWorks (great product) only problem was coming along a bit
late to gain software critical mass.

DeskMate's charm -- and its reason for existing -- is that it
runs quite well on even slower 8088 or 8086-based computers
without the need for expanded or extended memory.  No other "GUI"
could make that statement.

Making DeskMate icon-based would slow it down, and probably make
it incompatible with the already available DeskMate-based
applications.  Its reason for existing, and the advantage of its
software base would be lost.

Windows, especially version 3.0, really needs a 386 SX or water-
cooled 286 processor to perform acceptably.  And without a 386-
family CPU, it won't do some of its most appealing multi-tasking
magic.

As the cost of 386 SX chips drops, you will see them in more and
more computers priced attractively to home and individual users.
Today's relatively inexpensive pricetag on memory will find
4-8 MB of RAM not uncommon in many PCs.

These factors will drive many (if not most) of those computers to
be bundled with Windows.  There simply is no justification, and
little potential benefit to our customers or to us, in converting
DeskMate to an icon-based format.


Why Does My 85 MB Hard Disk Appear to be Only 83 MB?

Good question!  For some unknown reason -- probably marketing-
related -- the industry has begun to count "1K" as 1000 bytes,
rather than the traditional 1,024 bytes.

Here at Radio Shack, we formatted an 85 MB drive, using the
MS-DOS 5.0 operating system, and found it contained 85,018,624
bytes.  By the 1000-byte measure, that's just over 85 MB.  Using
1,024 bytes per "K" the drive would indeed measure 83 MB.

I recently added a "211 MB" drive to my home system.  Most of the
utilities that measure disk capacity list it as 203 MB.

The 85 MB drive owner had formatted his drive with DR-DOS, an
operating system I'm not personally  familiar with.  I do know
there can be a difference in final formatted capacity depending
on how the formatting utility does its work, and how many heads,
cylinders and sectors are specified.  I'm also told there can be
some minor "rounding-off" errors if the utility measuring the disk
capacity uses integer math.  (None of this takes into account the
issue of bad tracks on the hard disk, which certainly can
happen.)


Can I Upgrade My 2810 HD Notebook Computer to a 60 MB Hard Drive
Now That They're Available?

You can, but probably won't want to.  The cost of a 60 MB hard
drive, and the BIOS ROM chip you'll need to make it work, is just
about $1,100... plus installation.

You might well come out ahead to sell your present notebook and
purchase a 60 MB version.  Or, you may want to try one of the
software products that effectively doubles your hard drive space.

I haven't used one, but every user I've talked to says only good
things about them.  Uh... except for a couple of folks who found
"stuff" in their CONFIG.SYS file they didn't recognize, and
decided to delete it!

I hope everyone out there had a great Christmas, and that 1992
brings you and your family all the best!


See you next month.
