 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Member's Tips 'n' Tricks Ron Taylor |
Unlike many hobbies and interests, personal computers are an active or participative way to expend our time and efforts, as opposed to watching TV or videos (and they call "us" vegetables?). You can also use PCs for work too, but hopefully not much of that goes on - why waste good technology on the mundane!?!
Seriously, computers are the most versatile electronic tool available, we are fortunate to be living at this moment of history when they are being developed and becoming available on a mass scale. Yet it amazes me that so many people harbour negative attitudes to computers. There is the (expected?) anti-PC mentality, generally against all aspects to do with them but more surprising, a group of usually diehard conservative types who own PCs but seem to regret that their beloved tool is used by many for a single purpose - fun and entertainment!
At long last many of our newer Melb PC User Group members are younger "gamers". It is marvellous how much you can learn from games, not just physical coordination skills but technical as well. Games software usually takes the PC to the limit, although at times unstable, the software is far more innovative, and you are bound to see the good programming ideas in the games of today ending up in the business software of tomorrow.
Oh, don't forget to get your name in for the Melb PC Doom competition, if you are a bit past it (like me), just go along to watch and see those networked Hewlett-Packards in the Melb PC Training Room do their stuff, it should be a good day! Enough of that - back to business...
The Stripper
Michael Palmer
If you are hooked up to the Internet you will have an e-mail address and at sometime you will want to import a text file from your DOS machine to include in your mail. You may find, as I did, that when you import the file into your message there will be an end-of-line character (^M or Control M) at the end of every single line.
How do you get rid of the thing, make your message look professional and not drive the recipient mad trying to read it? Well, there may be a supplementary command in "rz" which does that, but if there is I haven't found it. I tried "rz -a" but this did nothing.
However it is not too difficult providing you use our old friend "vi" the text editor in UNIX. By the way, impress your friends by pronouncing this beast "vee-eye" and not "vye", as it stands for Visual Interpreter and is not short for Violet!
So....when in your home directory:
- Type
- Open "vi", the text editor with your file ready for action
- Go into global replace mode
- Replace string
- Ctrl+V = "here comes a special character Ctrl+M"
- Replace the special character Ctrl+M with a null string
- Enter
- Save the file
- Quit "vi"
BIOS Blues
Darryl Harrison
I am somewhat new to the world of PCs, but after a few months of owning a no-name machime, I began to wonder, "Is this all it can do?" Being an uncontrollable tinkerer from way back, I decided to consult the manual and see if I could squeeze a little more grunt out of the thing.
The BIOS on my system is an American Megatrends (1993 vintage) on a Soyo 486 motherboard. At the time I was using an Intel 486SX/33 chip and 8 MB RAM. Most instruction manuals are vague at the best of times (years of deciphering car workshop manuals prepared me for this), but I perservered nonetheless and gave it a go.
Using Norton Utilities V7.0 as a benchmark, I carefully checked all jumper settings and made what I thought were the right adjustments - lo and behold, I picked up a small, but noticable improvement! I then proceeded to investigate the bios settings.
Getting into advanced CMOS setup, I ensured both internal and external caches were enabled, video and adapter ROMs were shadowed, and checked the remaining options were configured correctly. Yes, just a little more performance, but not much.
After much head scratching, I thought about the auto configure function that was enabled and proceeded to disable it. Bang! - mega performance improvement. I discovered that auto configure totally ignored any change to DRAM speed/write options, cache read/write cycle options, bus clock frequency and video cacheable option.
Feeling pretty happy with myself, I happily plodded along, trying to learn more as I went. Imagine how dumb I felt when I discovered there was no external cache memory fitted to my board. I managed to con 256 KB of SRAM chips off Ron Taylor and now found my system outperforming the Osborne equivalant I use at work.
Owners of name-brand machines will probably not have to worry about any of this, but bargain hunters like myself could find it worth the effort. Budget price PCs don't appear to be set up as thoroughly as the big names, but you get what you pay for, and I'm completely happy. Make sure you have the correct manual for your system and write down any changes you make, just in case.
XTree Gold and .LZH Files
Michael Palmer
As XTree users know this great program has a facility for decompressing ZIP files with a couple of keystrokes. However what some users may not know is that XTree can be persuaded to decompress LZH files just as easily and as our BBS carries mainly LZH files this is, I have found, very useful to know.
First of all put a copy of LHA.EXE in your XTree directory (XTGOLD) then while in XTree go down the tree until \XTGOLD is highlighted and press Alt+E to enable XTree's text editor. At the prompt enter the file name LZH.BAT and then create and save a one-line file like this:
| LHA E %1 |
Now when you have an LZH file you want to decompress all you need to do is go into XTree and find the file you have downloaded (mine are always in C:\BLUEWAVE\DOWN to start with), and highlight it. Then press "O" for Open (or click on Open) and that's it! Your LZH file will be decompressed.
For an alternate method you can instantly convert any .LZH file to an equivalent .ZIP archive, then freely dispose of the LZH file and use the inbuilt ZIP functions of XTree to manage your new ZIP archived file. Just create the different version of LZH.BAT exactly as listed below in your XTree directory and use the "O"pen command on the LZH archive file as above.
|
@ECHO OFF :: LZH.BAT v2 :: XTree convert LZH to ZIP MD XXX CD XXX LHA x %1 PKZIP -m -P -o %4 *.* MOVE %4.ZIP %2:%3 CD .. RD XXX :: END |
How does it work? LZH.BAT version 2 will create a temporary directory (named XXX) on your hard disk and extract the .LZH archive into it (including any enclosed subdirectories that it may contain), then it will ZIP up all the newly extracted files with subdirs (if any). Lastly it moves the new .ZIP to where you were and deletes the XXX directory, it is up to you to delete the now redundant .LZH file.
If the .LZH file is on a floppy disk or CD-ROM it is necessary to copy it to your hard disk first before converting it.
When the operation is completed you will get the "Press any Key to continue..." message, back in XTree make sure you hit Alt+F3 to "refresh" the directory so your new ZIP file will be visible:
GUI Associating - at last!
Ron Taylor
As a slow convertee to GUIs, I give as an excuse the fact that the utilities in Windows are so limited. I always liked File Manager in particular, what turned me off mainly is its lack of an intelligent viewer/editor. Certainly you can "associate" files with specific applications, but who wants to load 10 MB of say; Winword just to read a 10 KB shareware instructions file just because it has a .DOC extension!!!
No, Windows does not allow you to define wildcards in the [Extensions] sections of WIN.INI. Thank God for the shareware/freeware world, as usual it comes to the rescue with a brilliant little gem called WinFileX. Look for WFILX120.LZH on the BBS, it should migrate to the Shareware library very soon for those who don't modem.
Toss it into your StartUp Group or put its filename on the "load=" line in WIN.INI, it's small and fast and runs tranparently in File Manager, when you click the right mouse button on any filename it loads the file into your user-defined "associated" program.
A tip - Adding the parameter "NoQuery=1" to the [WinFileX] section of WINFILE.INI along with your chosen default application will load a "non-associated" file into your application when double-clicked with the left button. This one's by Andreas Furrer - it's great and it's freeware!
When Disaster Strikes...
Michael Palmer
If, like me, you enjoy playing around with Windows programs and utilities of the shareware or freeware/public domain variety then before long you will find yourself in all sorts of trouble with conflicts, freezes, hangs and general foul-ups. My least favourite utility (which will remain nameless) put me in a neat little loop with a blank screen in Windows. So, when I rebooted I went back to the blank screen!
This makes life a little difficult and has you searching for the emergency boot disk. You have got one, haven't you? And you have updated it when you moved from MS-DOS 6.0 to 6.2? You didn't? Oh, dear! You are now at the point when the trickle of sweat goes down between the shoulderblades and you say to yourself "I'll never, never do this again."
Why not try this before disaster strikes, if you are using DOS 6.0 or better. Create a dual boot for Windows and DOS. Make copies of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT before you start (just in case of problems), then using your favourite text editor open CONFIG.SYS and type something like this (the choice of names is yours):
|
[menu] menuitem=winboot menuitem=dosboot menucolor=15,1 [winboot] |
Enter your current CONFIG.SYS settings here
| [dosboot] |
Enter your current CONFIG.SYS settings again and save the file!
Now...open your AUTOEXEC.BAT file and enter as follows:
|
goto %config% :winboot |
Enter your current AUTOEXEC.BAT settings which will probably end at "WIN". Then add:
|
goto END :dosboot |
Repeat your settings but instead of ending with WIN replace this with
|
PROMPT $P$G goto END |
Now...save your file once again!
Reboot and you should see a nice screen in blue with white text saying:
|
MS-DOS 6.x Startup Menu 1. winboot 2. dosboot Enter a choice: 1 |
Now when disaster strikes all you do is to reboot and choose "2" instead of your usual "1" and you will go to the DOS prompt instead of Windows. You can hop into your text editor (perhaps EDIT.COM) remove the offending files, edit your WIN.INI file, remove any XXX.INI files which the rogue program has created and then reboot. Choose "1" and you are back in business. It has saved me many headaches!
Windows and CD-ROM Potpourri
Ron Taylor
Oops! I'm getting carried away here, our esteemed Production Manager will have me keelhauled for overly long articles messing up his page layout for the mag. Sorry Peter, I was just trying to square up with with our many Windows users this month!
A hearty welcome back to Michael Palmer and many thanks for his helpful insights, mastering VI is not unlike golf is it Mike!?! Also to Darryl Harrison who promises further interesting stories for us about his upgrade "Blues".
[By the way Sword, I hope you don't want those SIMMS back that you loaned me. - RT]
In just a few months Darryl has been on a mission of upgrading, enhancement, fine-tuning and generally improving everything but the colour of the box - with great results and all self-taught! Proving that the personal touch and TLC of the DIY method can get much more reliable performance and self satisfaction than running back to a dealer all the time. Bye till next month.
Reprinted from the March 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
