 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Beginners' Bytes: Part 18 Ron Wilby |
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Beware, beware! Gates is everywhere. Apart from IBM's brave opposition he's got control of the world of PCs. He's trying to take control of your private banking too! The latest? He's into the most private area of all, your pharmacy. I just bought a packet of something the doctor prescribed, and what do I find? On the side of the packet is a DOSage chart. Gates again!
Disaster month?
There's been lots of phone calls this month from readers who've got themselves into trouble. No, not that, I mean people who have hard disk crashes or who've formatted their hard disk. They seem to be always using DOS 3.x, which doesn't have the UNFORMAT or UNDELETE facilities we're used to. What they never, never do is have a backup system, nor do they have a Disaster Disk. Then there are those who've bought a computer with DOS installed but no disks or manual. You're going to need them one day if you have a hard disk crash. This last group must complain loud and clear, they most likely were the victims of unsavoury practices, and there's a watchdog organisation which looks after that sort of nonsense.
Prepare for trouble
We've been through all these things before, but newer readers may not have seen those issues. Let's have a quick run through, I've already used my allowance of pages for this month so full details will have to wait.
First, the disaster disk. You must have some method of starting your machine if your hard disk or its data is defective. You nust have a bootable floppy disk (two is better) right there ready to go and you must have it now! Read Beginners' Basics in this issue for more on that.
Backups again
Second, you must have a backup system. What's that? A copy of all your programs and data (your hard work). You can go to this backup copy when trouble comes. Funny things happen, like the person who rang me last week. "My hard disk has only got COMMAND.COM on it, no other files at all." Somehow he'd formatted his hard disk with the /S switch, thereby making it bootable but removing all other files. Of course he didn't have a disaster disk. You'd be amazed how often my phone rings with calls for help, to which I reply "just use your backup, that will get you out of trouble." The answer is something like "well I was going to do it this afternoon..." If you're still down in the Stygian depths of using DOS 4 or lower, move up to DOS 5 or 6. Then you can use DOS Backup and Restore. Many knowledgeable people (including Doug Brooke if I remember right) don't agree, but my view is you shouldn't use DOS Backup for earlier DOS versions. Hopefully I'll get to write something on backups soon, but don't wait for me. Your hard disk will crash the day before, says Murphy.
My own preference for backup is to buy a tape drive. This may seem expensive, but backing up to disks needs a lot of floppies and that's expensive too. Besides, backing up with floppies is too slow! With a tape you can leave it running while you do something else. There are many good backup programs around, take your choice, but do it now. The help I can give you per phone is limited by the help you've given yourself beforehand with backups and a disaster disk.
Some other interesting calls last week. One from the chap who wanted my assistance with his young son's homework. The answer was in the Beginners' Basics of the then current issue of PC Update, but he hadn't bothered to read it. One from the man who said "yes he had read the Dial Help Rules, but wasn't sure exactly how they applied in his case." And of course the countless calls about the Internet.
Snippets
Thanks be to David J Hill, 3LO's afternoon veterinary surgeon, for some good programs and for the disk he sent me with printer drivers for Wordstar 6 and my HP DeskJet. A complete cure for my problems resulted.
Did you know that DOS is often identified by a letter as well as the Version number? If you type VER at your prompt DOS will say you have MS-DOS version 5 (or whatever). Try typing VER /R, and you'll get a letter also. This tells you which revision of DOS 5 you have. In my case, VER gives me version 6.20, while VER/R adds Revision A to the information provided. Confusing, isn't it, but it may account for some of those apparent incompatibility problems.
I have some relatives in New Zealand. They have a deer farm in the wilds and they also do something with software for the legal profession. I asked them whether they are farmers or computer people. The reply was "well, last week we swapped a 486/33 for twelve young lambs."
I don't use much shareware, preferring the greater ease of use of the commercial programs. I just don't have time to muck about. However, there are some programs which are a great help, in particular one called Personal Finance Manager. This looks after our household finances in a simple and effective way. The program was three years old when I first used it, so after a while I wrote to the author regarding registration. I'm still using the program, but I never did track down the author. I hear this is not uncommon, Shareware authors are often hard to find. Could this be because people don't register their programs, so they have to move on because of unpaid bills?
Bizarre implants
Our currently best-selling science author, Professor Paul Davies of Adelaide, turned up on my overloaded desk in the form of a Christmas present. It was a book called "The Last Three Minutes." In that he poses an interesting question. Since we can already implant silicon devices into humans and animals so they can in some way function better, isn't it likely that in the future we'll implant pieces of human tissue into our silicon helpers (robots?) to improve their ability to help us? This may sound like improbable Science Fiction, but the computer on which I'm writing this would have been a completely improbable flight of Science Fiction fantasy back in the 60s when we only had valves.
That's it for this month. I'll be back to annoy you in the next issue.
Reprinted from the May 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
