home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- USING PACKED FILES
-
- At Computer Solutions we strive to give you the maximum amount of
- information for your money. In order to do this, on many of our disks
- you will find that we have Packed some of the programs. Archiving
- information means that we have actually compressed the data so that we
- could put more programs on one single disk than you normally could.
- This means that when you receive one disk from Computer Solutions, you
- could get twice as many programs (sometimes even more!) as you would if
- you bought software from another company.
- However, information once it has been packed can not be used until
- you un-pack it, putting it back to it's original form. Doing this is
- not difficult, and everything you need is included on your disk.
- The first thing you should do is determine if the disk that you
- want to use has been packed. To do this, put that disk in your A:
- drive, and from the dos prompt ( A> for a floppy disk computer, C> if
- you have a hard disk) type :
-
- DIR A:
-
- This will list all the files on the disk you put in drive A:. If
- you look at the second column of information, those three letter
- combinations following the file name (called the extensions), you might
- see BAS, COM or any other of a long list of possibilities. If you find
- that there are file names followed by an ARC or ZIP, this means that
- those files contain packed information. Before you can use these
- programs you will need to extract the information from the packed file.
-
- HOW TO EXTRACT PACKED INFORMATION
-
- To un-pack information you will use a program called PKXARC or
- PKUNZIP. This is a utility supplied free of charge on all Computer
- Solutions disks that contain packed information. You will use this
- utility to extract all the packed programs on your disk, one at a time.
- Because packed data is usually much larger when it is un-pack it will
- probably not all fit on to the one disk that it came on. Therefore,
- you must first prepair a supply of blank formatted disks. If you are
- unsure how to do this, consult the manuals that came with your
- computer. Then, you can copy one of the packed files onto one of the
- blank disks. First you put the original disk that you got from us in
- drive A:, then put the blank disk in drive B:. If you only have one
- floppy disk drive, after the computer reads the file from drive A:, it
- will tell you to put the other disk in the same drive when it is ready
- for it. You should pick one of the packed files to do, and type the
- following to do this:
-
- COPY A:filename.ARC B:
- or
- COPY A:filename.ZIP B: (replace filename with the name of the file to
- do)
-
- After you have copied the packed file onto the blank disk in drive
- B:, you can extract the information you want. Type the following
- commands (with the original disk still in drive A:):
-
- B: (press return) (the prompt should then change to B> )
-
- A:PKXARC filename.ARC
- or
- A:PKUNZIP filename.ZIP (press return) (note: replace filename with the
- name of the file again)
-
- This should have taken all of the information out of the packed
- file, and put it onto the blank disk. You can now use the programs or
- information that was in that pack. If there were any other files on
- the original disk that you wanted to un-pack, you should put a
- different blank disk in drive B:, and follow the same process (starting
- with the COPY command) over again until all of the files you wanted are
- done.
-
-
-