DOS library program
The mystery of the missing Sound Blaster sounds
Security in Windows 3.1
Solution for Word 6 file-saving problem
The case for the case
IRQsome problems installing Dick Smith serial card
And another letter . . .
PC World glitch injures reader's sensibilities
The 504Mb drive size limit
Reading non-Mac disks on a Mac
I am writing in response to a letter from Simon Goeschl published in Australian PC World Septem-ber 1995 requesting information on a good DOS-based library program. We have such a product. Book Mark was written by teachers for use by the youngest children in a primary school. For this reason the program is easy to use and you will be able to quickly automate your library, and have your students doing all the work with little if any super-vision. In fact, one school has monitors who are responsible for the daily activities such as turning the computers on, returning all books, printing out overdue notices, printing reports for the teacher and even backup onto disks each night and turning everything off. It really is easy to use, yet contains all the sophisticated reports and statistics that you could want. Book Mark is installed predominantly in primary schools; however, it is also in a number of secondary schools, community libraries, toy and video libraries.
Book Mark will handle up to 65,000 items and 32,500 borrowers. It is installed in more than 1,000 sites, 230 of which are in Victoria. Book Mark Pty Ltd provides a complete service to our clients. We specialise in library automation and are able to provide an integrated solution where each component is designed to enhance the overall operation of the system.
Book Mark is currently priced at $650, which includes site licences for as many computers as you wish to use on one site.
- Barry Philp (Book Mark Pty Ltd)
Editor's note: This does sound rather like a plug, but it's also a useful reply to a reader's question and a locally-developed product, so we're letting it slip through. The product is written by the Education Department of South Australia. You can run it in a DOS box under Windows. Children use it to borrow and return books, and do public access over a network. Book Mark also markets an automated roll marking system using scanners. Kids swipe their library ID card (through the reader, that is). Book Mark's number is (03) 9886 1290.
While you can use any client/server network in conjunction with Book Mark, the company suggests a client/server operating system called TopWare. It's sufficient, but cheaper and less complex than systems such as NetWare. TopWare is distributed by Dataland, phone (02) 231 2727 or (03) 9416 3355.
I was browsing through a colleague's copy of Australian PC World (September 1995) where I read of the Sound Blaster woes experienced by Chris Hakkennes of Benalla. I recently purchased a Sound Blaster bundle which included a pair of Sound Blaster speakers. Chris describes the problem: the SB16 does not produce 8- or 16-bit digitised music, but does produce FM synthesised music. I too found this to be the case when using the DIAGNOSE.EXE program supplied with the bundle. Luckily I didn't know too much about the IRQs, base addresses or DMA channels, so I was reluctant to change them and I went in search of a simpler answer.
The speakers (genuine Sound Blaster) have an amplifier switch at the rear. If no power source (batteries or 6-volt DC adaptor) is available and the amplifier switch is on (the default factory setting), then no 8- or 16-bit digitised music can be heard, but FM synthesised music can be. I don't understand why, but switching off the amplifier solves the problem.
- Paul Blackmore
Editor's note: Thanks very much for this tip, Paul. I don't know why it works either. We'll take your word for it, but according to Gary Prior at Creative Pacific tech support, this can't happen. The signal leaving the sound card is analogue, and there's no differentiation between FM synthesised components and digitised sound com-ponents, so what you get from the speakers should be all or nothing. This is yet another of those mysterious behaviours of technology - I think I hear FM synthesised or possibly 8-bit digitised Twilight Zone music . . .
If any other readers have experienced the problem and find that this fix works, please let us know. We'll pass the information on to Creative Pacific and probe the mystery further. Maybe in the process we'll locate some of the items that have gone missing in the Bermuda Triangle.
There have been several letters recently about security in Windows, including a letter in your September issue from Bill Bradley of Bellevue Hill in Sydney. There are ways of locking Windows using WIN.INI or SYSTEM.INI, but these are cumbersome.
I use a freeware program called Secure-Group which I obtained from the Internet. With it you can lock any aspect of Windows. It is easily configured from an icon and I can't fault it. I use it on my office network.
I will upload a copy to anyone who wants it, or you can e-mail the author, Andreas Furrer, at s_furrer@ira.uka.de. I'm sure it could be found on any large Windows database.
- Stewart Bedford
Editor's note: Thanks Stewart. I found a copy of Secure-Group on the Monash CICA mirror at ftp://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/pc/win3/desktop/secgp115.zip
Search on-line services for a file called SECGP115.ZIP. I was able to put password protection on selected Program Manager groups, and disable the Program Manager File menu and Windows exit. It's a very handy utility.
Hi. Couldn't resist faxing this information to you as this is a real [expletive deleted] of a problem to solve. It refers to Andrew Vaschina's problem with Word for Windows in the August issue. This information is out of our Capital Office on-line troubleshooting guide and may be of assistance:
Microsoft Technical Support Information mentions that the device driver IFSHLP.SYS which is automatically loaded into your CONFIG.SYS file when installing Windows 3.11 is used to help provide 32-bit disk access.
Some users may be tempted to remove this driver if they are not using or cannot use 32-bit disk access in order to recover a small amount of memory. Computer Haven Technical Support has observed that running DOS programs and Windows programs without this driver may cause Windows programs to become unstable. (The effect was observed with Word for Windows 6). It is recommended that this driver always be left in your CONFIG.SYS file if running Windows 3.11.
The exact problem mentioned in Andrew's letter was fixed with the above advice.
- Will Nitschke
Editor's note: Thanks very much, Will. It's great to have readers solving each other's problems. I hope Andrew Vaschina reads this and tries it. Andrew, if it works let us know.
I refer to the CD storage item in October 1995 Help Screen. I find that my CDs that originally came in sleeves - eg, Groliers Encyclopedia, Sound Blaster, XingMPEG Player, Creative Graphic - all show scratches after a little use, so I went the opposite way and put them into cases you can buy for $2 for a 3-pack at "Two Dollar" novelty shops.
Slipping CDs into sleeves does scratch them! In cases they are safely suspended free from damaging contact. I prefer bulkier cases to ruined discs.
- Peter R Indermuhle
Editor's note: Thanks Peter. I hope this isn't going to start a bitter battle between sleevers and casers, like the Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Gulliver's Travels. I'm a fence sitter myself. CDs tend to remain in their respective vessels of delivery, be it sleeve or be it case. One thing that definitely does scratch them is using them as coffee coasters and Ninja death throwers, but this is recommended only for obsolete software or unfashionable thrash metal bands.
So here it is: an official
HELP SCREEN
COMPETITION!!!
Send in your list of imaginative uses of superseded CDs, or imaginative places to insert CDs for protection or otherwise. The winner will take home a CD-ROM version of Windows Draw 4.0 for Windows 95 from Micrografx, or Studio M Multimedia software for Windows 3.1. Your choice. Entries must be received by 1 May 1996. You know the rules, you know the address, so let's see those lists. The judge's decision is final, etc, etc.
Editor's note: Three readers wrote to say that the problem installing a Dick Smith serial card (cat no. X-2233), reported by John Hallinan in our November 1995 issue, is due to incorrect instructions in the documentation supplied with the card.
I also purchased an X-2233 serial card from Dick Smith Electronics and had problems with the installation. After a few frustrating hours I purchased, in desperation, a Simple Computing serial port upgrade kit in the hope that it would be a quality product and install correctly.
On opening the Simple Computing package I was at first horrified to find that the serial card was identical to the X-2233 sold by Dick Smith, except for the documentation. The documentation from Simple Computing, however, pointed out that the labelling printed on the serial card was incorrect and gave the true settings. I installed both cards in different machines with the jumper settings suggested by Simple Computing and had no further problems.
- Tom Scott
The documentation from Simple Computing showing the correct card settings
The letter in the mag did not highlight or mention that the reader's purpose in buying the Dick Smith Serial Card was to obtain high-speed serial ports with 16550 UARTs, to help prevent loss of data in high-speed modem transfers.
Please refer to a copy of my letter to Dick Smith Electronics on exactly this problem. Life is hard enough, but when the installation instructions are wrong, then that's a marketing problem.
- Bob Peterson
Here's an extract from Bob's letter to the manager at Dick Smith Electronics
I had a frustrating time, in trying to overcome IRQ conflicts in fitting your Dick Smith product X-2233. This would not have occurred had I realised that the instruction book supplied had a fatal error. My confidence had been shaken by the obvious error on page 1-8, but I was not quick to guess that in the headings on the JP1 Jumper Setting Table on page 1-6, COMA and COMB are the reverse order of where they should be.
This does not matter if the serial ports on the card are the only serial ports on the computer, but it surely does if you also have two other serial ports at the same time (most users will have) and limited IRQ availability, and you are trying to avoid a clash of a modem in one of the new ports with a serial mouse in one of the old ports.
My computer is now working fine, but there is little of my hair left that I didn't tear out in the process of installing the high-speed port card.
Page 1-6 from the Dick Smith manual, now with the correct setting information
Bob's letter continues . . .
Note 1: A 16550 UART is not the answer to high-speed communications in Windows 3.x. It will help, but even in DOS communications 28,000bit/sec modems can be too fast for most computers. Windows 95 handles data in a different way and overcomes some of the limitations of previous versions of Windows. (It can also help to purchase an enhanced serial port card such as a Hayes ESP2, unfortunately costing $175 or so.)
Note 2: MSD does not report the hardware IRQs actually used in COM ports. It always comes back with the defaults of COM1, COM3-IRQ4 and COM2, COM4-IRQ3, no matter what IRQs you set the serial card on.
Note 3: The X-2233 serial card offers IRQs 5, 7 and 9 as alternatives, however LPT1 uses IRQ7 and sound cards generally default to IRQ5. IRQ9 is a last resort as it cascades to IRQ2. It is possible to share an IRQ with a serial printer, as printers send few interrupts to the CPU and there should be few clashes. The easy answer was in your question "Do you need four serial ports?" (However, on my controller card, commonly fitted in 1993, disabling the COM ports is not offered as an option).
- Bob Peterson
Editor's note: This sort of thing shakes your very faith in technology. What are we to believe if we can't believe the documentation? Thanks very much for your help on that one, Tom and Bob. Let's hope Bob's hair grows back, and that Tom really wanted two high-speed serial port cards. Thanks also to Andrew Alliston who picked the reversed labelling.
I was browsing through November's PC World when suddenly, an enormous glitch sprang from the page and struck me square in the sensibilities.
When I regained my composure, my first thought was "That nice Neale Morison can't really be telling poor Uri Malaniak that his quest for a multiple-operating-system PC is hopeless, can he?"
Alas, it was so. I pondered this, reflecting on my own double-OSed box, the triple-OS configurations supplied by my local retailer on request, the quad-OS system I look forward to buying in a few weeks, and the quad- and quint-OS systems sported by a few friends who were kind enough to mail me their partition setups.
The multi-OS capabilities of OS/2's Boot Manager, Linux's LILO and NT are known far and wide, and a wide selection of multi-OS boot selection utilities (both commercial and public domain) are available just by looking around.
Uri, point your browser to
http://www.sinica.edu.tw/simtel/simtel_index_bootutil.html for some of the utilities of this sort. One of the better ones, BOOTANY, has been around since about 1991 and is still going strong.
Note that DOS/Windows and Windows 95 both require that they be placed on a primary partition, which means you need two primary partitions, resulting in either 1) neither being able to see the other when booted (not necessarily a bad thing!); or 2) both OSes rubbing elbows in the same partition.
Also note that the Mac OS interface will prob-ably not be available on the same machine as traditional "Intel-type" OSes for a while yet, as IBM/Apple are still fiddling about with the PowerPC and inter-platform specifications.
Good luck, Uri, and remember: "Those who stop to say a thing cannot be done, will be passed by those who are already doing it."
- Stephen Davidson
Editor's note: Hopelessly wrong, yes, I know, I admit it. I asked Stephen why he needed to run multiple operating systems, and here's what he had to say.
It's a tinkering thing, Neale. Our parents tinkered with cars and radios, we tinker with computers and the Internet. Part of that tinkering is the search for the "ultimate" system - the ultimate hardware, the ultimate software - and the ultimate OS to run it on.
Unfortunately, although there are many OSes out there, none quite fit the image, or have the innate capabilities, to do everything we want. So we compromise: DOS and Windows 3.x for compati-bility with older, grumpier software, and for when Windows 95 runs into those version 1.0 bugs; Win95 itself to work with the rest of the population, and for better performance than DOS+Win 3.x; OS/2 Warp for better, more solid multitasking and general maturity than Win95; Linux, or other versions of Unix, for networking and keeping up with the Unix/Internet crowd; and NT, if you can cope with it, for security and robustness. The list goes on . . .
And of course, just for the hell of it. To be able to be knowledgeable in wider fields. To be able to say "Well, that's very impressive, but of course I run SIX OSes on my PC . . ." whenever computers come up in conversation. To be regarded with awe by those who think a mouse is a small, grey furry mammal, and to be able to toss around phrases like "System slowed, zombie children floating in the pipe again" and actually KNOW what it means, even if no-one else does. And, of course, to see our names in print :-)
(The best bit, of course, is to wait until someone gets a "Fatal Error", or something similarly-named, and when asked about it to blanch and say "OK, don't panic, move away from the computer, really slowly . . .")
- Stephen Davidson
Editor's note: Zombie children floating in the pipe?
More ways to create a multiple boot system
I am responding to the Help desk section from November issue, in particular "Multiple Boot utility" for Uri George Malaniak, but also "Duplicating Windows 95 diskettes". As far as I am aware, software can only write to write-protected floppies if the drives are faulty. I would like some concrete evidence to show me that Microsoft have a way around that one.
I run a 486DX2/66 with 16Mb of RAM, and two HDDs (540Mb and 850Mb). On one occasion this year I decided, just after I got my 850Mb drive, to load the floppy version of Win NT 3.1. I have been running OS/2 since v2.0 and DOS 6.2/WFW 3.11. I have been using OS/2's Boot Manager (included with OS/2), as it allows multiple boot partitions.
Boot Manager lives on a 1Mb partition of HDD 1 (the first hard drive), so as to pick up the MBR. From there it offers you the choice of bootable selection. (At one stage I had four options to choose from.) You can set up a default selection and a time limit. When you install a new operating system it will usually make its own partition active, but any FDISK program will usually allow you to set Boot Manager as active again. OS/2's FDISK program is about the best that I have used.
DOS must be loaded on a primary partition of disk 1 (the first hard drive, sometimes disk 0). Windows 3.1 can be anywhere. OS/2 can be loaded almost anywhere; at the moment I have it loaded on the second logical partition of my second HDD. Windows NT will load almost anywhere too, as long as it can use a bootable DOS partition to boot from.
For example, on drive C: I had DOS 6.20 with WFW3.11; on drive E: (on the second HDD) I had OS/2 Warp; on drive F: I had Win NT. It all worked fine (except Win NT could not find my CD-ROM, so it went soon afterward).
I do not know how flexible Win95, Win NT 3.51 or Unix are as to where you can place them, however, you split your drive up into primary partitions. As stated above, DOS must be installed on a primary partition. You can have as many primary partitions on your drive as you need or like, but once you boot from one the others cannot be seen.
For example, if I split my 540Mb drive into three primary sections and booted up I would have only one drive letter (C:) available, but there would be two other "C:" drives hidden. This is why OS/2 and NT are good. OS/2 can be loaded on almost any logical partition, and if you use HPFS (high performance file system) it is hidden from FAT.
NT can see HPFS and FAT, as well as its own NTFS, but not Unix partition, nor I expect other primary partitions. (I believe that you can install DOS, Win 3.11 and Win95 on the same partition by installing the Windows programs in different initial subdirectories.)
I don't know if Unix/Xenix can see FAT. If you are running Unix you may not necessarily want to see Win95 or DOS/Win partitions. You would need to work out how Unix loads, and plan how you are going to set up your system and what you want to see from where.
You would install OS/2 Boot Manager in the first 1Mb using OS/2 FDISK (you do not need to load OS/2 at this time); you would then split your disk 1(s) as fits your needs. (Win NT comes with dual boot as you know, so selecting the DOS partition gives you the Win NT dual boot prompt.) If there is another OS that needs to boot from a primary partition, then set up two C:s on disk 0. If you really want them to be separate, then use two or more HDDs and split the first up for enough space for each OS to load, and use the other HDD(s) for data storage. For the price of HDDs these days that won't cost too much.
- Simon Walker
Editor's note: Thanks Simon. I'm tempted to say don't try this at home, but I have a funny feeling that's what a lot of our readers are doing.
I have read numerous letters over the last few months about large IDE drives and a utility called EZ, etc, etc. I would like to comment on a few of these and, as well, I hope to provide an answer to the question of what do I do if my drive is over 504Mb.
Where I work we are only just starting to use drives greater than 504Mb, and I will be the first to admit that they gave me a few problems at first. First, before we answer the question, what exactly is the problem?
Most of your letters blamed the right culprit - the system BIOS - but it is also a problem with the original IDE interface.
It goes something like this. The IDE drive, using an ATA (AT Attachment) interface, is accessed by the ROM BIOS INT13 services. The system BIOS INT13 interface only allows for a maximum 1,024 cylinders, 255 heads and 63 sectors per track (SPT). When this standard was established this probably seemed to be more than generous. However, along came IDE drives with the ATA interface, which itself was limited to a maximum of 65,536 cylinders, 16 heads and 255 SPT.
The key point here is the limitation on the number of heads. As you can see with the limitations of the BIOS and the IDE drive, we end up with a maximum of 1,024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 SPT. If you want to do the multiplication of 1,024 cylinders by 16 heads by 63 SPT by 512 (there are always 512 bytes in a sector), you will arrive at the magical 504Mb.
The actual answer is 528,482,304 bytes which you need to divide by 1,048,576 (an actual computer-speak megabyte) and you will get exactly 504Mb.
If you have a drive that is, say, 1,300 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 SPT and you enter this in the CMOS setup, FDISK will only see 1,024 by 16 by 63 so you won't be able to use the whole drive. You cannot quite simply partition it into two halves of 650 cylinders each, as you intimated on page 184 of the September 1995 issue. To put it quite simply, FDISK won't touch anything beyond the 1,024th cylinder, no matter how much you partition the drive.
Let me re-emphasise here we are talking about IDE drives, as SCSI drives and ESDI drives usually take care of this problem by translating the hard disk parameters with the BIOS on the controller. There have been a number of letters about various drivers and programs that work around this problem by fooling the system into thinking that the drive is not what it really is.
If this is your only alternative, then I guess that is what you have to use; but I don't like to use drivers for anything that I don't have to. In the machines in which I have been installing large drives I have been upgrading the motherboards to newer ones with LBA (logical block addressing). If you check the date on your system BIOS (assuming you have an AMI BIOS) and it is either dated 07/25/95 or later, chances are you have a BIOS that supports LBA already.
LBA fools the system into thinking that a drive with more than 1,024 cylinders has, in fact, less than 1,024 cylinders. For example, a theoretical drive of 2,000 cylinders, 16 heads and 48 SPT would look - to FDISK - to be 1,000 cylinders, 32 heads and 48 SPT. With LBA you put the true parameters of the drive in CMOS and then look in your setup for where to enable LBA.
If you have already partitioned the drive without LBA enabled, I suggest you delete these partitions first (after you have backed up of course), as changing to LBA on a drive that has already been partitioned without it can confuse the hell out of FDISK (not very hard to do). Then repartition it with LBA enabled, and then and only then will you have access to the whole disk.
I hope I have managed to explain myself clearly. The only other point I would like to comment on is your statement on page 186 of the September 1995 issue, and I quote: "I'm so glad that Windows 95 will make all this disk size nonsense a thing of the past." I guess you may already be regretting saying that, basically because it is not true. Windows 95 is bound by all the limitations I have already pointed out, which apply to Windows 3.11 and before, Windows 95 and Windows NT, and of course DOS and anything that operates on top of it.
One operating system that doesn't fall into this trap is OS/2. The only limitation with OS/2 is that the boot partition be within the first 1,024 cylinders - what you do after this is up to you. When I first set up my OS/2 system on a 1.275Gb drive with LBA enabled it worked fine, but as an experiment I set it up without LBA.
This drive has around 2,100 cylinders. I set up a primary partition of 300Mb for the system, etc, and a 900Mb extended data and program partition. This, coupled with the HPFS (high performance file system), gave astonishingly faster access times than using LBA, which has to work through the BIOS translation process. And by the way, OS/2 using the HPFS doesn't have to worry about cluster sizes, as do DOS and Windows 95, because OS/2 divides the disk up into 512 byte blocks so there is no difference in slack between the 300Mb partition and the 900Mb partition.
I now use OS/2 Warp Connect exclusively at work, and find it a great operating system. With all the stuff that comes with it (Bonus Pack, Notes Express, etc), you don't need much else, especially if you are into the Internet big time. Anyway, keep up the good work.
PS. I don't mind if you publish my e-mail address. I would only be too glad to help out anybody if possible.
- Phill Hardstaff,
102643.2625@compuserve.com
Editor's note: Thanks very much, Phill. The LBA information may help a lot of readers get the most out of their hard drives. It's also very interesting to hear someone providing firm technical reasons for preferring OS/2.
I am writing in reply to your answer to Terry Kyle of Kirribilli, NSW, who was having problems mounting non-Mac disks on a Mac Desktop in order to transfer Word files [September 1995, page 170].
Of course the answer you gave was correct, but there should be a zero cost, zero effort option open to Mr Kyle.
Unless the Macintosh is fairly old (too old to have a high-density floppy drive), it should have a program called Apple File Exchange available on the machine's hard disk or present on Apple system disks. This program allows files to be transferred between the Macintosh file system and non-Macintosh floppies, avoiding those nasty non-Macintosh disk warnings.
Newer machines (newer OS releases) have Mac PC Exchange which allows DOS disks to be mounted on the desktop and the files to be accessed directly.
In my experience (Word 5.1 Mac at home, WinWord 2.0c at work), I find that files saved as Word for Windows 2 format make the transfer between platforms more reliably than the Word for Macintosh format, so my transfer disk is always a DOS-formatted disk containing files saved as Word for Windows 2.
If you are going to use a program on the PC side to mount Mac disks, ensure that you do not attempt to use an 800K Mac disk. To fit 800K on a disk that normally holds 720K (back then, that was a serious amount of extra space), Apple used a variable speed drive. Any Mac with an 800K or high-density disk drive will read these disks, but no disk drive on the DOS side is physically capable of doing so.
PS. Thanks for providing the service that you do. I know it sells magazines, but I know that I have recovered the sticker price on quite a few issues with the little gems that I have extracted from them.
- Mark Wilkinson
Editor's note: Thanks for the tip, Mark. We don't do it to sell magazines, of course. Nothing could be further from our minds. We believe that unless we all unite to share what information we have about technology, eventually machines will triumph and the world will look just like the opening credits of Terminator II. It's about empowerment, it's about enhancement, it's about synergy and leveraging - but, I don't know, it never occurred to us that it might help sell magazines. Maybe you're right. I'll mention this to the editor. n