 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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Theme: Utilities
It is a happy coincidence that Gordon Eubanks, the main speaker at this monthly meeting, is CEO of Symantec, the world's leading maker of utilities.
Utilities are housekeeping programs that range from the trivial to the full-blown application with lots of options. There is no hard and fast rule as to when a program is an application or a utility. Perhaps a test you can apply is to ask yourself if the program is fundamental to your use of a computer.
A word processor is an application program; many of us buy a computer for that end in mind. Similarly; databases, spreadsheets, project planners, draughting or graphics packages are also applications.
Utilities appear to have come on the scene from the little battlers who were tired of waiting for someone else to supply some tiny feature they saw on a mainframe or something that nobody thought of before. Peter Norton was one such programmer who put together his small assortment of programs and sold them as The Norton Utilities (NU).
The Norton Utilities by Symantec
The main theme of NU is data protection and recovery. Most of us have heard about backing up valuable data. NU does not serve this end (as does Norton Backup, a separate program also from Symantec), and face it, few of us back up data as often as we should.
Touch wood, I have neither lost a hard disk nor found a virus on my computers, but I tend to lose data through carelessness. I delete a file only to wish later I hadn't done that. Nowadays Microsoft tends to supply more and more utilities with DOS but at one time you had to use something like PC Tools or Norton Utilities. They have an option that enables you to unerase a file or directory provided that something else did not overwrite it.
Why buy NU when DOS apparently gives you this feature? DOS utilities are lightweight: Undelete is a command-line program that does not tell me adequately whether an erased program is in good enough shape to be recovered. NU's Unerase option is a menu-based improvement that lists all erased files and their relative "recoverability".
OK, NU comes with many other tools that I use daily or several times each month. My PC always runs Norton Disk Doctor (NDD) and Image when it starts. As I fool around with beta software and released programs that are little better than beta, I sometimes have to reboot the PC when it gets locked up. Some of the glitches might be caused by my use of DoubleSpace but I don't like to think so. NDD always catches these problems and gives me the option to fix the hard disk. Image makes a copy of the PC's basic road map (the boot sector, the file allocation table and root directory) in a safer location.
From time to time I run Speed Disk, which defragments my hard disk and improves performance. They say it makes no difference on a DoubleSpace disk, but I feel better for doing it. Oh yes, I forgot to mention the Rescue Disk, which would help me recover from a disk crash when it finally happens. I have seen it used in anger at work, and it does work. I use Text Search when I'm looking for a word that is in some file somewhere on my hard disk. I can log the results to a file and then it is easy to find the elusive text. NU has far more powerful tools that would let me edit any byte on the hard disk, but it has been some years when I last dabbled at that level. I recommend NU to every computer user.
List
Vern Buerg has written many programs but List is the most celebrated. I use it for directory tree navigation and file movement while in DOS. In other words, I can copy, move and delete files and traverse the directory tree. I sometimes need to look at the hexadecimal value of a character and find List adequate. Thanks to Gary Taig, I discovered that List (through a companion utility) enables me to view the contents of an archived file. It does many other things, I'm sure.
Info Select
For a long time I listened to Charles Wright singing the praises of Info Select by Micro Logic; Gary also wrote a favourable review of it in PC Update. Barry Michaels of Step Up Systems finds and sells the most intriguing of utilities and Info Select is one of them. He gave me a demo and I have started using it as a search tool. I imagine I will use it as a text entry tool eventually but for now it retrieves text in the blink of an eyelid. Just imagine typing out the search key: as you type a few letters, a little display shows many coloured dots, which decrease as you complete the word. These dots represent the instances of that word, and you can look them up in their source documents. I had to massage my CompuServe message files before Info Select could use them efficiently, but it was worth it.
AccuBoard
Another tiny gem from Step Up Systems, AccuBoard is a Windows clipboard that goes a lot further. Everything you cut or copy in a Windows application is accumulated in this utility. When you are ready to use that information, you paste it into the standard clipboard (or into your application). When I am collecting snippets here and there, this tool removes the need to make lots of temporary files and to assemble their contents. It is a perfect complement to Info Select.
Others
Of course there are many other utilities that I use. Come PC Update production time, I use Graphic Workshop for Windows. For screen dumps I use the standard Windows PrintScreen button method but I sometimes find it convenient to use Grablt as a temporary container. For compressing files I use LHA, although PKZip is equally handy. For text editing, it can be DOS Edit, QEdit or just Windows Notepad!
Reprinted from the November 1994 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
