I would like to offer my assistance to two of your readers who reported problems in July's Hardware Q&A in your excellent magazine.
Firstly to Ben Skeates of Mt Isa: I bought a very similar machine to his in July 1993 and it displayed the identical problem that he describes, plus some others to do with the video card. I found All Data, through its newly-opened office in Parramatta in Sydney, to be very helpful, however. The problem was with the Windows video drivers, and by simply updating them the problem disappeared. I include a disk with the upgraded drivers on it for you to forward to him.
To install them all he has to do is run the INSTALL.EXE file from within Windows, and follow the instructions. It will probably be helpful if he deletes the old drivers from his \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\ directory after he has done this. They can be distinguished from the new drivers by their dates, the new drivers being dated 9/05/94.
Secondly to Paul Chang of Kew: I assume his hard drive is manufactured by Seagate, as I have just purchased one of their Decathlon range and it came with installation software called EZ-Drive.
When it installs it modifies the master boot record on the hard disk so it can bypass the system BIOS. To boot from a floppy disk you have to hold the control key down at a special time or the computer won't recognise the new master boot record.
To disable EZ-Drive he should put a bootable floppy disk in his A drive and re-boot the computer without using the special procedure, then put in a disk containing FDISK.EXE and type fdisk/mbr at the A: prompt. This will reinstate the DOS master boot record without re-partitioning the disk and, according to the documentation, will not affect any installed files. He will, however, only be able to use the first 528Mb.
I found your method of circumventing the 528Mb barrier interesting, and while I would be the last to contradict anything you say, it was my experience with the drive that even when I created a primary partition of, say, 400Mb, FDISK would still only allow me a further 128Mb for the extended partition, even though my CMOS correctly reported the drive as having 815Mb available.
I solved the problem by purchasing an Enhanced IDE controller (Promise 2300 VLB), which allows the new Mode 4 drive to sizzle with a data transfer rate of better than 16Mb/sec, and average seek time of 8.3ms, according to Norton Utilities 8. This compares more than favourably with my two-year-old Quantum Pro LPS drive with a data transfer rate of 2.5Mb/sec, and an average seek time of 15ms (I fully expect that their recent drives are competitive with the Seagate).
Now, perhaps you or one of your readers could help me? At present I am using a video card with a Tseng Labs ET4000/W32i chip with 2Mb of RAM that came in a very colourful box labelled Viewtop. I would dearly love to get some updated video drivers for it, as the ones that were supplied, dated 1/12/93, do funny things to my display when I switch from Windows to a DOS-based screen. Do you have any ideas where I might obtain them from? Thankyou again for a very informative magazine.
- Billie Fuller, Torquay, Qld
Editor's comment: Don't hesitate for a moment to contradict me, Billie. At best, I'm fumbling around in the dark when it comes to hardware. You're absolutely right about the enhanced IDE. When I tried the method it didn't enter my head to wonder what controller card the machine happened to have. It's readers like you who make this column worthwhile - thanks a lot and keep up the good work!
As for your display adaptor with the Tseng Labs chip set, one knowledgeable distributor is TWC on (02) 749 1166. That's pretty good news, but better news yet is at hand: Windows 95 has a built-in 32-bit driver for that chip, and if the driver provided for my ATI card is any guide, it'll really fly. So when you get a chance to upgrade, you'll be in clover.