 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group A Beginner's Tale: Part 10 Ron Wilby |
 |
Last month's Editorial contained an impassioned plea by Ash Nallawalla for people to help with the writing of Beginners' material. Thanks to Graeme Triggs and John Button for their assistance with material which has helped create this month's Beginner's Tale.
Ron In the Horrors
Let me tell you of my recent computer "horrors." Suddenly I lost my prompt. Nothing on screen except a little blinking line (white). Entering commands from the keyboard produced nothing, except that the little line moved across the screen.
My AUTOEXEC.BAT file contained a command like
PROMPT=$e[32;40m$p$g
Refer to the end of last month's episode, where you will see something like that.
This gave me green letters on a black background. [I change the numerals sometimes to alter the colours and reduce boredom on long typing jobs].
So where did my prompt go? I tried everything. Booting from my "disaster floppy" (with a different AUTOEXEC.BAT) was unsuccessful, and enabled me to alter the prompt command to PROMPT=$p$g which put me back in working order, but I wanted my "colour control" prompt back. I tried replacing ANSI.SYS, then COMMAND.COM. I took ANSI.SYS out of high memory into conventional. I deleted ANSI.SYS. No result, still no prompt.
Desperate, I went to the New Users East SIG. Anyone know what's wrong? Thanks to Doug Brooke and Graham Paul, we now know that Murphy(?) had set the figures to give black characters on a black background, hence nothing visible. Was my face red?
More Horrors for Ron
A few days ago I was mucking about with my word processor (WordStar) and somehow changed the colours to the original default values, which I think are awful. At this point I should have used my backup to restore my previous colour choices. Stupidly I started changing the colours. Some days went by the backup was overwritten, and would you believe I've never got the colours back to where they were before I mucked up everything. Fools rush in!
Frustration
A couple of weeks back I had a housekeeping session, moving, renaming and copying files to floppies. After copying, the files were returned to their original names. I work a lot with files of 300 kB, and noticed CHKDSK was showing an alarming decrease in free hard disk space. As my hard disk is too small anyway I had to do something. Examination of file sizes showed a "hidden" directory called SENTRY, which was part of PC Tools. This directory had suddenly grown by 6 MB, which was more than I could allow. What Sentry contained was information to "make undeletion of accidentally-deleted files more foolproof. Foolproof?," with me around??
Would you believe (no, you wouldn't), I had to "Uninstall" PC Tools to delete those files. Having done that I decided to see what the newly-arrived DOS 6 could do.
DOS 6 In Action
A quick look through the Manual (if you ignore that dreadful cover) is encouraging. You get virus protection, a defragmenter, a better Backup and Restore facility and a better Memory Manager. So let's go. The installation was nice, simple and quick, and it picked up all my program-starting batch files (see last month) and gave me a nice menu, all without any effort on my part.
The New Features
MEMMAKER
After installing DOS 6, I tried the new memory-optimisation program, MEMMAKER. This program goes automatically through the way you are currently using memory and then takes appropriate action to adjust your memory configuration to make the best use of whatever you have. MEMMAKER quickly moved device drivers etc. around, putting some of them down into conventional (640 kB) memory from where I previously had them in upper memory. There is now a whole 45 kB of Upper Memory left free, which could be useful in the future. I thought it strange that some items were moved down from Upper Memory, but MEMMAKER did make available an extra 2 kB of conventional memory, so I was happy.
BACKUP
Next I tried making a Backup. The program promptly informed me I would need twenty-nine floppies and it would take 16 minutes without verification, considerably longer if I set Verify on. This was too much for me, as my PC Tools CP Backup took only 14 disks and 18 minutes with Verify on.
MSAV (Microsoft Anti-Virus).
To try the virus protection, I put the command MSAV/P in my autoexec.bat file. My comment is that although the anti-virus feature seems good, it is very very slow. Also, there are some reports about problems with MSAV. Back to McAfee's Scan?
Defragmenting
I tried the De-fragmenting Utility. It is very quick, but on one trial left my hard disk very fragmented and it took my ancient Unfrag Utility 9 minutes to correct it all. However, on another trial run, DOS 6's DEFRAG did better than UNFRAG. It seems that neither DEFRAG nor UNFRAG is perfect, but even so, DEFRAG is fast and a defragmenter (optimiser) is a necessity for all of us.
UNDELETE and HELP
Two excellent features of DOS 6. The UNDELETE facility is much improved and the on-line HELP is great. All you need do is type HELP at the prompt followed by the appropriate filename. For example, if you are mystified about the DELTREE command, simply type HELP DELTREE at the prompt. I just did this from within my wordprocessor, and got more than two screens of information about DELTREE. This HELP facility is the reason why the Version 6 Manual is so much smaller than the one with Version 5.
What Is DELTREE?
It's a beauty! If you've ever tried deleting a program stored in a number of subdirectories you would appreciate it. Instead of having to first empty each directory and then delete it, as DOS 5 users do, one command will delete all files and subdirectories from a specified point. If you mess it up, the new UNDELETE will get it all back for you.
Reprinted from the September 1993 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
