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- TOM'S COMPUTER NOTES FOR MAY 1991
-
- Public Domain
-
- OUT WITH the old hard drive and in with the new SEAGATE 85meg
- SCSI. Easy job but (of course) it took me 3-4 hours to get it
- running right. First there was a conflict with one of my cards
- for "who gets the memory." I could use my new drive or I could
- use expanded memory but not both at the same time. Got that
- solved and there was a conflict with my floppy controller card.
- The SCSI interface card and the floppy controller card fighting
- for the same memory. It took a lot of playing with CONFIG.SYS and
- jumpers on the cards. All of a sudden I had everything working!
- What combination had finally worked? I don't know and I don't
- care. I just put the case back on the computer and kept my
- fingers crossed. It's been working for a month now so I guess I'm
- OK. P.S. - SPINRITE II won't do a low level format or set
- interleave on SCSI drives.
-
- CAROUSEL Ver. 5.0 arrived. I had skipped Ver. 4.0 so can only
- compare 5 to 3.0 and it's a bit of an improvement. CAROUSEL has
- always been (in my experience) the most crash proof program in
- existence. Still is..... Installation didn't go too smoothly....
- Had to do a lot of tweaking to get it right. The manual sez that
- CAROUSEL isn't copy protected but SoftLogic has done something to
- it because I copied all the files from the two 3.5 inch masters
- to a 1.2 floppy and then tried to INSTALL but the message "not
- original master disk -installation aborted" kept coming up on the
- screen.
-
- THERE IT GOES AGAIN- Right after going to the paragraph above to
- insert the extra periods in the paragraph above (following "Still
- is") I tried to SAVE (I'm in WP 5.1) and I got the error message
- CAN'T FIND WP.FIL. When you get that message you are out of luck.
- Can't even QUIT Word Perfect. You have to reboot. Or, popup the
- CAROUSEL menu screen and use "Kill a [running] Program." So, you
- lose any work not saved. I'm in the habit of saving (via <Alt>
- <S> macro) at the end of every paragraph. Think I'll put WP51 in
- my PATH and see if that does any good. (It didn't).s
-
- BORLAND SURE KNOWS how to get money out of me. Yet another
- QUATTRO PRO upgrade, Version 3.0.... I wonder why SPRINT never
- had an upgrade? --- Stephen Manes calls SPRINT "the late,
- unlamented SPRINT" in this months issue of PC COMPUTING.
-
- CALLED GIBSON RESEARCH to inquire about the possibility of a
- version of SPINRITE being released for SCSI drives. The tech
- support division told me, "We already have a version for SCSI
- drives. The standard version. It just won't low level format. It
- does everything else." ... "Pardon me? It 'just' won't low level
- format? That's what I bought SPINRITE for." ... They said, "At
- some point in time we will address that problem - for SCSI
- drives." I'll be holding my breath waiting for that....
-
- I GAVE TEXTRA 6.0 some hard knocks a few months back. Tried it
- again and it's looking better. Actually, quite good for a $99
- program. What got me to working with it again follows:
-
- WORD PERFECT GAVE ME some tips for beating the "Can't find
- WP.FIL" blues. They were: Load with the /32 and/or /NE options. I
- have tried /NE before with no result and /32 was a new one on me.
- Someone else suggested turning OFF the timed backup option in
- SETUP. Will let you know next month if anything helped. I also
- found out that WP doesn't like hardly any memory manager BUT
- 386MAX. The WP speller still hangs from time to time, about 4
- words into a document. Requires me to re-boot. I tried running WP
- with no TSR's, cache, etc., but it still hangs. The only thing to
- do for spell checking "problem" files is EXIT and spell check in
- TEXTRA, which has a better spell checker anyhow. TEXTRA 6.0 will
- read/write WP 5.1 files as its "native" file format if you set
- that option.
-
- LATE NOTE: I finished the Notes with the above paragraph and then
- tried to spell check the file. Got a "please wait" message that
- was permanent, with a hung computer. I'm over in TEXTRA finishing
- this now.....
-
- THE END
-
-