 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Members' Tips 'n' Tricks Ron Taylor |
Welcome again to T'n'T. Now that the warmer weather is over most of us will be spending a bit more time at the keyboard, a good opportunity to expand our knowledge and get control of these beasts. Better still, why not use the PC to keep tabs on the footy, it may just give your team that little extra to get through to September.
Those who have been following this series would have seen last month's tip from Terry Day. This time Terry shares three of his interesting problems and the solutions he has found. To top it off, TnT would not be complete without the usual informative and always entertaining tale from my regular subscriber, Alistair (the Llama tips just keep a-comin') Lloyd. So, on with the show!
DoubleSpace and Memory Managers
by Terry Day
DoubleSpace has been criticised for being unreliable. However, in MS-DOS 6.2 a lot of the problems have apparently been fixed. When my hard disk became almost full, I decided to give the 6.2 version of DoubleSpace a trial.
My system has a 210 MB hard disk partitioned into two drives - C: and D:. I decided to only compress drive D: for my first test of DoubleSpace. All went well during the compression phase. It took only an hour and I ended up with 89 MB free, on a 105 MB partition that previously had only 20 MB free.
I finished with five drives in my system A:, B: (floppies), C: (uncompressed hard disk), D: (compressed hard disk), E: (CD-ROM), and F:, the physical drive on which the compressed drive D: existed. When I tried to access drive F:, I found a problem. If I tried to change to the drive, (type F: and press Enter) my computer locked up.
A bit of intuition, followed by a small change to CONFIG.SYS showed me that the driver DBLSPACE.SYS did not like how it was being loaded into memory by my memory manager program RAMBOOST.
My system uses the MS-DOS 6.2 versions of HIMEM and EMM386 to set up memory. However I use a program called RAMBOOST from Central Point PClbols Pro v9 to load device drivers, etc. into high memory at bootup. RAMBOOST is like the MS-DOS program MEMMAKER with one difference, with an appropriate line in CONFIG.SYS it checks AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS for changes since the last bootup. If it finds any, it automatically re-optimises how to load programs into high memory.
All of this is much more convenient that having to run MEMMAKER manually after each change to one's system files. Most of the time RAMBOOST gets things right first try, except in this case. After about an hour of experiments, I found the solution was quite simple. By moving the line
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\DBLSPACE.SYS /MOVE
from the bottom, where DoubleSpace Install had placed it, to the top of CONFIG.SYS, the problem vanished.
Perhaps it is software conflicts like this that have generated some of the bad press for DoubleSpace. Since PCTools is such a popular program (the new version 9 for DOS is excellent, in my opinion), I hope this helps anyone else who is planning to run MS-DOS 6.2 DoubleSpace and RAMBOOST.
An Adventure with Delimited Data
by Alistair Lloyd
Great, thought I, scanning through the bulletin boards at 3 A.M. in the morning. A full Zone 3 FidoNet address list, I could use that. So I fired up Zmodem, and into my arms it came.
Unzipping revealed something new to me -it was a comma delimited text file, not easy to read, or to gain useful information from. Seeing this, I shut down Unzip, and started WordPerfect for Windows 5.1. By selecting the file type of ASCII-delimited Text File the data was converted instantly into a mail merge field format. Great if you want to dial out to over 1200 Fido Nodes, not so good for easy browsing.
I moved on to Excel for Windows, here's where the action started. Most of us have used or seen a spreadsheet, MS-Excel has a number of great options that are quite surprising. When opening my poor confused text file, I chose the "Text" button on the control form Excel had presented me. Here it gave me the option of comma, space, colon, tab, or any number of delimits that would be separating the data in my file. I chose comma, and voila! Instant spreadsheet of Text!
I didn't even let the screen saver activate before I was at it again. Excel will enable you to save data in a variety of fashions; one of them being dBASE DBF format. To do this, you will need a unique field heading on top of each column of data. In this case, I used NAME, SYSOP, NET ID, etc. That done, each column should be changed to its maximum width for the data it contains. This can be done by choosing Column Width from the Format menu, and clicking the Best Fit command button.
Now, with all data in view, it's time to tell Excel that the spreadsheet is about to be transformed into a database. What you need to do is highlight all the data being used, including the field headings, and at least one blank line at the bottom. Choose the Set database option from the Data menu, and your database is born! 1b save it, simply use Save as from the File menu, and make sure the output option is DBF. And so, my bewildered text file went from delimited format, to mail merge, to Excel spreadsheet, to database. Remember that the reverse can occur as well. A database of information can easily be "loaded" into Excel, and saved as a text file for use in the word processor of your choice.
A TrueType Multimedia Upgrade
by Terry Day
In January I purchased a MediaVision Fusion Double16 multimedia upgrade kit for my system. This kit is on sale at many stores in Melbourne. Although most aspects of the kit were fine, I experienced one software problem that puzzled me for a while.
One of the Windows 3.1 programs in the kit is Pocket Mixer v3.2. It simulates a multichannel mixer for manipulating sounds. When I first ran it, some of its screen labels were illegible because they were being displayed in a fancy TrueType font that I have on my system. The program had no "select font" options in its menus, nor any hint of such an option in its documentation.
After some experiments, I realised that the program had a very dumb way of selecting a font for the display of some of its text labels. It was simply looking through the [fonts] section of
WIN.INI and selecting the first TrueType font it found in the list of fonts. On my system, this was a decorative font.
I fixed the problem by editing WIN.INI to make Arial the font name at the head of the [fonts] segment of the file. Another solution is to use Windows Control Panel to de-install all of your
TrueType fonts, then re-install Arial on its own (so its name ends up at the top of
WIN.INI [fonts] segment), then re-install all your remaining fonts in one go.
The programmer who wrote Mixer seems to have assumed that all Windows systems will remain unchanged from the format that is set up when Windows is first installed. When this is done, the TrueType fonts Arial, Courier and Times are installed and Arial will be the first TT font in the [fonts] list in
WIN.INI. However, as I have experimented with a lot of fonts, my WIN.INI was no longer standard.
This particular kit is quite popular, so if you purchase it and experience this problem, you now have a solution. The programs in another Media Vision software package, called PowerPak, also have the same problem.
There is a funny story here. When I encountered the problem and requested help from the dealer who sold me the product, he was unable to assist. However, he did give me the phone number of Media Vision tech support. They too were unable to help, and disbelieved my description of the problem.
When I found the solution, I phoned tech support again, to tell them about it. They still did not understand, so I sent them a fax of screen dumps,
WIN.INI listings, etc. to support my diagnosis of the problem and its solution. It turned out the tech support man had been trying to diagnose my problem with an earlier version of the program on his screen! No wonder he was confused.
His company had not supplied him with the version of the software that was in my kit. I must make it clear that the tech support guy was very helpful and patient, so I have no complaint about his honest attempts to help me. It seems to me that his company let him down by not keeping him up to date with the software he was supposed to support.
Battles: Write and my Trident
by Terry Day
Some time ago, I created a document using Windows Write that contained screen images that I had captured to the Clipboard by using Alt+Print-Screen, and then pasted them into the document. Recently, I decided to update the file and experienced a strange problem.
On loading the file into Write and attempting to move the first screen image further down in the document, I was greeted with the error box Problem drawing or printing object [OKI. When I clicked on OK, the image in the document was replaced by a rectangle containing a circle and a few diagonal lines (a bit like the targeting grid in a video game). I tried reloading the document and printing it. The error box message Problem with object/link (OK) appeared. The images in the document were replaced with "targeting grids", and only the text of the document was printed.
After a lot of panic and some experiments, I determined that Write and my Trident 640x480x256 video driver do not like each other. I had recently changed to this driver, after using the standard Windows VGA driver for the last 9 months.
By changing back to the VGA driver, I was able to edit and print the document normally. Other types of strange behaviour have surfaced with Write and this driver, so I will be getting an updated driver as soon as I can.
My reading of magazines has made me realise that conflicts between programs and screen drivers are quite common. However, this was my first encounter with one. My major complaint is that Problem with Object/Link was not a very informative error message for me in this situation. I guess this is all part of the fun and challenge of owning a computer.
Gamesmanship in Windows
by Bon Taylor
Readers of Dave Mitchell's "Eddies" in PC Update will enjoy his regular tales of BBS gamesmanship, with his column in the March edition exposing a humorous inference of my "Windows bashing". Here I will bare all and admit that I like Windows and use it regularly. But then, we must always make time for some "gameplay".
A few quick runs of Solitaire and you can usually "get it out" in a short time with a good score. But, when playing Draw Three it's a bit harder. Well, that is unless you hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift as you click the deck, it lets you draw one card at a time!
And let's not forget good old Minesweeper? Just start it up and type:
xyzzy
then press Enter, then Shift+Enter
A pixel in the uppermost left hand corner of your screen will light up whenever the mouse pointer is on a
safe square.
Those tricks are not my own, they have been around for a long time and the original authors are unknown. Still, I am sure you may find a use for them, as Dave would say, "Never give a computer an even break". After all, no doubt you are all aware of the little "surprise" in Solitaire when using the deck with the Dealers Arm graphic. Enjoy!
Thanks again to the contributors to this column. Time for a special note to users of our BBS. I see a lot of very helpful tips up there, please remember that we have more than 7000 readers of this magazine and less than 2000 have access to that info. Most members do not have modems. So please post your handy tips to me for publication, your knowledge can then benefit all members in the posterity of hardcopy. It may not make you rich, but you will be famous!
Reprinted from the May 1994 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
