 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Nybbles and bytes Ron Wilby |
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When I was young my father told me about Paddy, who was a woodsman. That meant he spent his time in the forest cutting trees with an axe. When he was old, Paddy would tell his friends about his wonderful axe. "It has had eleven new heads and twenty new handles and it has lasted my whole life. It has been a wonderful axe." Well, my old computer is the same. It came into my house to replace my ageing XT, which I sold for $1000 would you believe (no, you wouldn't). When it arrived, it was a 286-16 with my first colour monitor and a "huge" 40 MB hard disk! A great step forward!
Since then, many upgrades, and now the latest has brought us up to that 8 MB of RAM we always needed and a bigger and better monitor, 17-inch (why are we still using inches?). This is wonderful, two people can comfortably watch the screen while composing letters or PC Update articles.
Does anyone want to buy Ron's NEC 3D 14-inch VGA monitor, used for countless episodes of Beginners items for PC Update?
A software axe too
Over two thousand files on my hard disk, and I don't know why many of them are there. It has been a worry for some time, and of course it gets worse every day. Windows applications arrive, with their countless files, and the situation is out of control. Then I heard about Quarterdeck's new program Clean Sweep. If you have a cluttered hard disk it will search for duplicate files, eliminate surplus READ.ME files and generally clean up. At a street price of about $60 it does a terrific job. In a one hour session, after the short installation process, I deleted over four hundred files and freed more than 18 MB of hard disk space. Enough room for my Internet Connection. I like it!
Gifts from above
Another "tidy up" move seemed to call for a change to Norton Commander and XTree Gold. They have the ability to identify files with meaningless names. You probably don't need these files, and with Norton you can easily delete them (much easier than using DOS's awful Shell).
So, having bought these gems, a pleasant surprise when, a few days later, the postman delivered an expensive looking parcel. Even more pleasant to find that the accompanying invoice was for $0.00. Why? Well, when you register your software purchase, you enter "The Weekly Draw for a Special Prize". You know the sort of thing; you don't really believe it, but you want to register so you send it off. (I once won an air conditioner that way). In the case of Symantec, you'd better believe it, because my package contained free copies of Norton Antivirus and Norton Backup. My tape backup is probably all I need, but I haven't had time to open either package yet. Thanks, Symantec, well done! When I register the prize programs do I get into another draw for another prize and thus tap into an endless store of free software?
And now, last night the Volunteer of the Month Award, with Symantec once more offering gifts. So now I've got two copies of Norton Antivirus, one of Norton Utilities, and two of Norton Backup. All in their original shrink wrap. What to do?
For your library
You must have noticed the huge numbers of books on the Internet. I've even received something like a mini-magazine, in two separate versions. These are for Beginners and Intermediate Users, or for Intermediate and Advanced Users. If you're trying to get "Net literate" there's a lot for you to look at, but watch the prices and make sure you've got the time to read it all.
OS/too?
As the August release date for Microsoft's Windows 95 approaches, we all wonder about the result. We've doubted; we've sneered at Microsoft's ability to keep to schedules; but perhaps we were wrong. There are clear signs that IBM is not pushing OS/2 development. They may be accepting whatever market share they've managed to get so far rather than spending lots of cash to get very little more result. You can be certain that if Windows 95 is a success, OS/2 is going to play a minority role in the great Operating System Battle. Please note however, OS/2 has many built-in advantages over Windows and if you don't have to run with the mob you should consider it.
That's all for this month, folks. See you in the next issue.
Reprinted from the September 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
