9/96 News: Heads Up

• Out of Tune
  We've been troubled by recent reports that Wintune, WINDOWS Magazine's test and tuneup software, has logged some unusually slow SCSI-drive readings. We've since heard that some SCSI drives have their write cache turned off by default, even though the read cache is on. Disabling write caching ensures that the data is quickly committed to disk. That prevents its loss during a power failure, but it really gums up performance. If you've gotten low SCSI scores, you might want to try enabling the drive's write cache. The significant performance boost might well be worth the risk.
• While preparing a PC for NT beta installation, tech maven John J. Yacono encountered a logical drive as persistent and slippery as an electric eel. Every time he tried to delete it with FDISK, the program said there was no evidence of the logical drive. When deleting the partition, it complained that there was a sequestered logical drive present. The solution: Delete the partition (ignoring the program's verdict), then leave FDISK and reboot. When you run FDISK again, it will behave more rationally.
• We recently mentioned that Microsoft had unleashed a Macro virus on a promotional CD. Well, they've done it again, this time via a Limited Edition Office Compatible CD-ROM. Luckily, the virus was caught by a copy of Norton AntiVirus armed with the latest catalog of viruses; the list is available at http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/download.html. If you don't have it, use Microsoft's own solution, available at http://www.microsoft.com/kb/softlib/mslfiles/wd1215.exe. Wonder why they didn't use it themselves.