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- TOM'S COMPUTER NOTES FOR AUG. 1990
-
- Public Domain
-
- THE LATEST FROM MICROSOFT: (If you are keeping track):
- Quick BASIC 4.5
- BASIC 7.0
- Flt. Simulator 4.0
- Multiplan 4.2
- Chart 3.0
-
- FOR YOU TEXTRA FANS: (Is there still any such thing?) Ver. 6.0
- will be in your hands by Sept. 10th. It's in "the final stages of
- testing now" sez Ann Arbor Software. Don't hold your breath.
-
- CHECKING YOUR AMORTIZATION PROGRAM: Input this -- $7,000 loan, 7%
- interest, 7 year term. The monthly payment should compute as
- $105.65. Next, check the third payment. Do the principle and
- interest add up to $105.65? Most amortization programs (and
- spreadsheet templates) have a one cent rounding error. MONEY
- COUNTS is one program that does it right.
-
- ALPHAWORKS is now renamed LOTUSWORKS. It's a word processor,
- database, communications program.
-
- IBM HAS A NEW VERSION of the PC Jr. called the PS/1. Well, better
- than the PC Jr., we all hope. It reminds me of the ZENITH [flop]
- called the EZ. (Being remaindered now for $299.) Flop may not be
- the right word when someone can sell 900,000 of them (the EZ)....
- The PS/1 starts at $999 with a 1.44 floppy, mono VGA, a mouse,
- 512K, and bundled MS WORKS. DOS 4.01 is installed in ROM.
-
- BEST BUY IN AN XT clone seems to be the EPSON EQUITY 1+ at $450
- which gets you 640K, one 360K floppy and a monitor. Half the
- price of a PS/1 and the EPSON is expandable. Drop a hard card in
- one of the slots and you have a good entry machine or backup
- machine. (It may have gone up to $499 at Montgomery Grant by the
- time you read this.)
-
- I BOUGHT MS WORKS Ver. 1.0 and upgraded to Ver. 2.0 when it came
- out. Still haven't found anything worthwhile to use it for. Maybe
- I'll get a laptop someday and it will come in handy then. Someone
- on a tight budget could buy an EPSON computer and a copy of WORKS
- and have everything they need (communications, WP, spreadsheet)
- for several years worth of computing for not very much money,
- however.
-
- HOW GOOD ARE THOSE 86 cent HD 3.5 inch Hong Kong floppies from
- MCI MICRO? I bought 25 of them. All formatted to 1.66 megs but
- one. It was OK at 1.44 megs.
-
- FREE DEMO DISK of ViewPoint, a project management program. Call
- 1-800-635-5621.
-
- FREE DEMO DISK of Lotus Freelance Plus 3.01. Call 1-800-842-8455,
- Ext. 810.
-
- I CONTACTED THE AUTHOR of PCMANAGE to see how I could get the
- program to run it's DCOMPRES utility without littering my hard
- drive subdirectories with INDEX.CMP files all over the place. I
- told him I ran DCOMPRES/i (the no index mode) so I didn't want or
- need a hundred INDEX.CMP files. He said there was no way to do
- what I wanted to do.
-
- A PROGRAM CALLED DEFINITIONS PLUS puts a TSR dictionary on your
- hard drive. It works with WORD PERFECT, WORD, etc. Nice popup
- dictionary but uses LOTS of disk space (it comes on seven
- floppies.) It works as a spellchecker too. If you look up a
- misspelled word it suggests a correct spelling before coming up
- with a definition. But, it won't batch spell a file. For what it
- does you are probably better off with a paper dictionary.
-
- I GAVE A DISK FORMATTING program called FDFORMAT a try. It's on
- BIGFOOT as FDFMT15.ZIP. The docs said I could get 1.72 megs on an
- HD 3.5 floppy with FDFORMAT B: /F:1.72 on the command line.
- (After loading FDREAD.) All I could get it to do was give me
- "address mark not found" errors, which are not explained in the
- DOCS.
-
- THE END