Travels and Travails

Traveling, lecturing, lobbying, watching the launch of a spaceship, testing modems, setting up a NetWare network, having printing problems, getting a new monitor--Chaos Manor is aptly named

Jerry Pournelle

The good news is that we have the Novell NetWare server running. Alex installed NetWare 3.11 on a Gateway 2000 4DX2-50, and all went well. I haven't had a chance to work with it much yet, but at least it's installed. Windows for Workgroups is no bad start on LANs for small businesses, but it does have limits; in particular, it hasn't been reliable with large-capacity optical drives (see below), doesn't have security, and has very limited support for DOS machines. We're looking forward to working with NetWare to link up Windows, OS/2, and Macs.

We're using NetWare 3.11 rather than version 4.x because I'm told that getting 4.x up and running can be more difficult, and since I don't have multiple servers or a complex system, version 3.11 is good enough. I expect I'll know a lot more about that in a month or so; stay tuned.

One reason I didn't get to the network earlier was that the trips haven't stopped. Three this month--I'm writing this crammed into steerage class on a cross-country flight. I was asked to lecture on space operations to the Air War College at Maxwell AFB in Alabama, and the U.S. government not only wants my time for what amounts to no fee, but they will pay only for a tourist-class seat. With all my travel, I have upgrade certificates, but I didn't manage to book an upgraded seat; which gives me an opportunity to test laptops under ghastly conditions.

One trip I did thoroughly enjoy was to White Sands Missile Test Range to watch them launch my spaceship. Actually, DC/X isn't quite a spaceship, and it isn't really mine; it's a one-third scale model of the spaceship that Genera l Graham, Max Hunter, and I sold to the National Space Council in 1989. McDonnell Douglas managed to build it on time and in budget, and it flew precisely as expected, going up, hovering, and landing on a tail of fire.

My present trip combines my lecture at the Air War College with a trip to Washington to talk with members of Congress about how we can revive the X programs, which enabled the U.S. to dominate world aerospace for three decades after World War II. Alas, the only people who remember how the X programs worked are dinosaurs like me.

The X programs were not big operational projects, nor were they prototypes. They were small, tightly managed projects using the best available technology to build the best test vehicles we could make. The output was a practical application of new technologies that could then be used by industry to build operational aircraft. The effect was to reduce technical uncertainties. Firms could concentrate on using that technology to build marketable products. Entr epreneurs will take market risks or technical risks, but faced with both, they'd rather put their money in something less uncertain.

The X programs gave us a long period in which it would have been thought absurd for a major airline to buy airplanes from anyone but U.S. companies. Then McNamara canceled the X programs in the name of arms control. Now, you're as likely to fly on an Airbus as a U.S. plane, and the Brazilians are selling us commuter airplanes. How are the mighty fallen....

I'm writing this on the ancient Zenith Mastersport 386SL, which turns out to be endurable even in steerage. The Mastersport has a smaller screen than some of the newer laptops, but that's counterbalanced by that splendid Zenith keyboard and a general feel that just plain works; and perhaps the small screen is an advantage given the cramped working space. I've carried a lot of laptops, and I've liked several of them; but every time, I find myself coming back to this old Mastersport.

I remember when 9600-bps m odems were a big deal; now they all come with 14.4 Kbps, and many are even faster. Whether you can use that new speed is another matter. The latest arrival at Chaos Manor is the ATI 14400 ETC. ATI Technologies is no newcomer to the modem game. Many of my friends are very fond of their communications equipment.

The ATI 14400 ETC modem comes with a communications program called Comit and SofNet's FaxWorks 3.0 for Windows. I can't recommend Comit at all, but the modem works all right with Datastorm's Procomm Plus and HyperAccess, which some columnists swear by. FaxWorks isn't my favorite laptop fax program for Windows--I'm more familiar with BitFax, which comes with the AT&T/NCR machines--but it seems to work all right.

Washington, D.C., has lousy telephones, as I discover every time I go there. Whatever modem I carry, I have trouble getting on-line at all, and I almost never manage to connect at 9600 bps. On this last trip, I traveled light: no checked luggage, just a briefcase and my wheeled carry ons. After I got my clothes and toothbrush in, there was precious little room for electronics, so I carried Macronix's MaxLite 144 fax modem, which is only slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes. When it came time to connect to Tymnet in Washington, I found that a 9600-bps connection was impossible. It took three tries to get on at 2400 bps with error correction. That worked, but there was so much error correcting, it felt like 300 bps.

When I got home, I decided to experiment. Was my problem with the Mastersport, the MaxLite 144, or Procomm? The first move was to call the Washington 9600-bps number with my standard setup: the Big Cheetah 486, Procomm running as a DOS program under Windows, and a USRobotics Courier HST Dual Standard 14.4-Kbps modem. I've always considered the USRobotics modem the all-around best one available for connecting to noisy lines. (Also, USRobotics updates their firmware for modems in the field; have you registered your modem?)

When that worked on the first try, I tr ied the 9600-bps number with the Mastersport and the MaxLite 144. No lock in three tries. At 2400 bps, I got a lock, but it was a slow throughput, just like when I was in Washington; so at least the condition was repeatable, and I could run some tests.

I got the same result with the MaxLite 144 and Big Cheetah, so it wasn't likely that the problem was a bad serial port on the Mastersport. To be sure, I tried the USRobotics modem on the Mastersport and got a 9600-bps connection first thing. Then I tried the SupraFaxModem 14400. That locked on at 9600 bps, but it needed two tries. At 9600 bps, the ATI modem locked on first try. No difference between the ATI and the USRobotics modems in several trials; both worked perfectly. Several tries with the SupraFaxModem showed that it would always work, but sometimes it did need two tries. I never got a 9600-bps lock with the MaxLite 144.

After that, I tried a particularly noisy path line to an Internet node down toward San Diego. It's a good test; of all m y modems, including the ATI, the only one that would work at 9600 bps was the USRobotics, and it took two tries before it got an error-correcting lock. All the others failed no matter how often I tried, despite experiments with initializations.

The ATI modem comes with good manuals, and it's generally easy to set up, but you may have to try different setup strings. The USRobotics modem generally works with its default settings. I have similar reports from Mike Banks, the coauthor of my communications book. If you deal with lousy communications nodes, you're better off using a USRobotics modem. The ATI 14400 ETC is nearly as reliable.

Of course, both those modems are big. If you're traveling, the SupraFaxModem costs less, is much smaller and lighter, and will generally do the job, but it's still bulky compared to the MaxLite 144. The MaxLite 144 can be battery-powered, but, alas, it won't always connect at 9600 bps. However, it usually will get 9600 bps, and it always seems to work at 2400 bps.

I have found a real glitch in the networking capability of Windows for Workgroups, but I learned to love Maximum Storage's Duette optical drive. My Windows for Workgroups network usually consists of four machines: three 486s of various speeds and one 386. Windows for Workgroups is a peer-to-peer network and doesn't really have servers, but the 386 sort of functions that way. It sits back in the cable room and is loaded down with assets to be used by the other machines. In particular, it has a Pioneer DRM-604X Minichanger CD-ROM drive and a Pioneer read/write optical drive, which I use for archiving programs and book files when I am done with them.

Sometimes, when I use File Manager to move a big chunk of stuff across the network to the Pioneer optical drive, the system will trundle along for a while and then lock up. When it does that, it locks up cold, and I can't access either the sending system or the 386 "server" where the optical drive resides. When that happens, I can generally use Ctrl-Alt- Del on the sending system; to close File Manager, and after a while, something times out over on the 386. I'll then find that some files have been moved and some haven't.

I confess this annoyed me, but it didn't happen often enough that I really worried about it. No data was lost, and nothing was irretrievably locked up. While my general philosophy is that if an error rate is high enough to measure, it's too high, there were so many possibilities--the Pioneer optical drive, the Cheetah 386, one of the network cards, Windows for Workgroups itself--that I just learned to live with it.

Then I got the Duette drive. This thing is the fastest optical drive I've ever seen. I used a Future Domain SCSI card to install it on a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66, and it just screamed. Meanwhile, I did have the problem of storing a whole bunch of installed applications files while I reformatted the PS/2's hard disk. The simplest way was to use LapLink Pro and a parallel port to move the files to the Duette. That's much s lower than the slowest network, but it does work.

My first attempt wasn't very successful. Since the Duette seemed to work just fine under Windows--it appeared as drive D on the Gateway 2000--I did the file transfer with the Gateway 2000 running Windows for Workgroups and the PS/2 running OS/2. This had the advantage that I could move files between the PS/2 and any computer on the Windows for Workgroups network. However, when I started moving huge blocks of files from the PS/2 to the Duette, odd things happened, and eventually the system locked up.

The remedy to that was to exit Windows and run LapLink Pro under DOS on the Gateway 2000. That worked fine, and pretty soon I had 400 MB of files transferred from the OS/2 system. When I put the Gateway 2000 back into Windows for Workgroups, I had no problems moving files from the Duette to other machines.

So far, so good; but then I tried to move some files across the network to the Duette. Pretty soon the system locked up, exactly as it had w ith the Pioneer optical drive, so I had the same problem with two different computers running two different optical drives. Clearly, Windows for Workgroups isn't happy about networking to optical drives.

OK, thought I: I'll move the files to the Gateway 2000's hard drive and then move them again onto the Duette. That way, I won't be writing to the optical drive across the network.

The transfer to the Gateway's hard drive worked fine, but when I moved this big block of stuff onto the Duette--a local move--once again it locked the system. I exited Windows and used Norton Commander to move the files under DOS. That was no problem. I'm told that people running straight Windows don't have problems with file moves, so I concluded that Windows for Workgroups doesn't really understand large optical drives. There's a new version (3.11) of Windows for Workgroups coming out soon. It's supposed to fix a lot of problems and provide many new features. I'll try that when I get it.

We have Windows NT, bot h in shrink-wrapped copy and in the Win32 SDK (Software Development Kit). The SDK comes with a CD-ROM chock full of development tools, including NT 3.1, lots of code, Visual C++ for NT, a system guide, and a partridge in a pear tree. Microsoft makes a real effort to get this stuff into the hands of software developers just as soon as they can, and they set their prices as low as possible. Meanwhile, IBM had a low-cost special on their OS/2 development and device driver kits, but that's over: the price is back up to $600 or so.

I recall way back when Texas Instruments' research people produced some really interesting software development tools. They decided to license and sell them at what they thought were fair prices, which were still high for developers who weren't sure they wanted to work with the TI systems anyway. Lo, they sold only a few copies, and not many developers wrote applications for TI systems. Moral: making money by selling SDKs is eating your seed corn.

I haven't installed Windo ws NT, and I probably won't for a while. Friends assure me that it works, and some people I respect think it's wonderful, particularly as a development environment. I believe this. What I don't believe is that Windows NT is particularly relevant to small systems just now. With regards to PCs, NT is a stalking horse that will be relegated to much larger systems when the new Microsoft "dream" operating systems--code-named Chicago and, more important, Cairo--come out. (At one time at least, there was also a Newark. The slogan at Microsoft is "on to Cairo"; Newark is further than Chicago but not yet to Cairo. Incidentally, I understand that MS-DOS 6 was code-named Yakima, which is closer to Seattle than Chicago.)

NT's real role is to combat IBM's higher-end RISC stuff like AS/400. I'm told that IBM's AS/400-related revenue in 1992 was $14 billion, with a $2 billion profit; no small sums, even for Microsoft.

Thus, working with Windows NT is no waste of time. In addition, Chicago and Cairo will have m uch in common with NT, and it's much in Microsoft's interest to provide an easy migration from NT to the new RISC-based operating systems we're about to see. As desktop machines become more powerful, there will be more and more integration of software, and NT is likely to serve as a bridge between mainframes, big workstations, and high-end desktop systems.

I also understand that Chicago will incorporate peer-to-peer networking within the operating system. I think Microsoft had hoped to bring Chicago out soon, making any improvements to Windows for Workgroups a waste of time; but they just released a Windows for Workgroups upgrade, which may put a handle on when they expect to ship Chicago.

There's too much software that won't work and won't tell you why. Last night, I found I couldn't print. Chasing that particular problem down took most of the day and was instructive.

The first thing to check is cables. I looked at the printer cable. Just to be sure, I got out an Inmac Blue. Inmac cables are pricey, but they're extremely reliable.

It wasn't the cable. Keyboard next: a faulty keyboard can overload the A20 handler and cause odd addressing errors. Changing keyboards did no good, so the next thing was to define the problem. I found that Windows for Workgroups would print to my Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III using Q&A Write. That uses a font cartridge. However, when I tried printing with Word for Windows (which uses TrueType fonts), I'd get a line of garbage across the top of the first page and dozens of pages of blank paper thereafter. This is not what a novelist on deadline needs.

Next question: Could it be Word? Make a test message in Windows Write and try printing that. Same result.

First things first. I solved the deadline problem by using LapLink to send the entire Word for Windows directory, program and files, over to the PS/2 Model 77. I then let OS/2 "migrate" Word for Windows. That created a Word icon letting me run Word without opening the Windows Program Manager. Pri nting required that I string a cable from the OS/2 machine to the LaserJet III, open the file in Word for Windows, and tell it to print. Nothing to it, and in truth, OS/2 prints so much faster than Windows, I actually saved time doing it that way.

That got my story draft printed and showed clearly that the problem wasn't with my files, my copy of Word, or the printer. What was left? Corrupted printer drivers in the Cheetah's copy of Windows? A corrupted copy of Windows? I used Palindrome to restore the entire Windows directory from DAT (digital audiotape), which took about 20 minutes. For good measure, I erased the HP driver and reinstalled it from the original floppy disks. No joy: I still got a line of garbage followed by many pages of blank paper.

The next step was to use the Windows for Workgroups network to send the Word directory over to the Gateway 2000 4DX2-66 and connect the printer cable to that machine. It printed fine, meaning that my problem was specific to the Cheetah. Sigh.

Eventually I figured it out, but first a diversion, which I assure you is relevant. Meanwhile, I confess to being a bit annoyed: Microsoft sells us these highly complex systems, and then when they don't work, they want us to pay for technical support. There has to be a better way.

I have a new Nanao FlexScan T560i 17-inch monitor. Mind you, there was nothing wrong with the old one, which has been in constant use for well over a year; but Nanao is proud of the energy-saving features in the newer models. The Nanao offices are near Los Angeles, so Brian Mast offered to bring out a new model to swap for my old one.

I confessed to some misgivings: I still hadn't figured out why I couldn't print, and this would be yet another change to the system. Still, the computer shouldn't be able to tell the new monitor from the old, so I agreed, and promptly forgot about it until Brian showed up outside Chaos Manor. We lugged the FlexScan upstairs--it's a heavy sucker--and connected it up. As promised, it worked perfectly.

If, like me, you sit staring at a computer screen most of your day, you owe it to yourself to get a Nanao monitor. They make really big ones, but the 17-inch FlexScan seems about the right size for me: I put it about 30 inches from my nose, and my text lines are just the right length so that I see the whole line without moving my eyes. Meanwhile, the colors are sharp and crisp, and everything on the screen is as steady as if it were painted. Best of all, I'm in a brightly lit south-facing room, but I don't have a problem with glare. People often ask me how I turn out so many words: the secret is good equipment, and the FlexScan is a big part of that.

Brian had also brought a copy of the newest edition of Berkeley Systems' After Dark screen saver. Of course, screen savers don't do anything you can't accomplish by turning off your monitor, but I confess an attraction for Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock's antics, and even the notorious Flying Toasters. The new edition has another feature: after an interval you can set, Mr. Spock goes away, and the screen is totally blanked out. When the FlexScan detects that condition, it shuts itself down so that it draws only 7 W, as opposed to a couple of hundred when it's active.

The bottom line is I love this Nanao monitor.

When I started to install After Dark, I got a Protection Violation error, and when I reset and tried once more, it happened again. This caused me to wonder if my computer was doing something flaky, so I went into the BIOS Setup program and turned off shadow RAM and caching. When I booted up and tried the After Dark installation again, I got the same error. Brian assured me that most of the people at Nanao use After Dark with Windows for Workgroups, so clearly the problem was something about my own installation.

One nonstandard feature is a shareware program called Plug-In for Program Manager. I've written about this before: it enhances the Windows Program Manager without replacing it. It does such a good job that althoug h I rather like Symantec's Norton Desktop for Windows, I find with Plug-In I don't use Norton. Time to remove that--which did the trick. After Dark installed just fine. Since removing Plug-In solved one problem, maybe it took care of another? I knew darned well I'd been able to print with Plug-In installed--in well over a year, this was the first glitch I could trace to it--but it would do no harm to try printing.

Word printed just fine. I installed Plug-In again. Tried printing. Worked just fine. So did After Dark; it was only the installation program that fought with Plug-In.

I could print again, but, of course, I had the cache and shadow RAM turned off. I turned them back on, tested again--and couldn't print.

Jeff Sloman finally solved the problem for me. Turn on BIOS cache and shadow RAM, get into Windows for Workgroups, open the Printer icon in the control panel, and deselect the box that says "Fast print direct to port." Ignore the dialog box about ports, and Bob's your uncle.

I've been offered an explanation of why this works, and I suppose by next month I'll care; meanwhile, here's another instance of software that can't tell you what's wrong with itself.

Every time I threaten to abandon Windows, I find another valuable program that needs it. VisSim is a simulation program that turns your PC into an analog computer; that is, you can build various analog blocks and connect them up on-screen the way you would connect the physical operational amplifiers and other analog components with wires.

I wrote about a previous edition a year or so ago. There's now a greatly improved version. Alas, the manual isn't much improved. You'll need to know something about model building or have a separate book on analog modeling systems; but assuming you know what you're doing, VisSim is very powerful. There are also new add-on modules, including Analyze, and a real-time interface to many analog/digital boards. You can use VisSim to model a complicated control system and then connect i t to the real thing in real time.

VisSim works with matrix operations programs, including MatrixX. There's a C-code generator module you can use to write compilable code that will run models about 10 times faster than the on-screen visual-block models do.

VisSim is a good general-purpose tool for modeling systems, from something simple like an artillery shell to the Jay Forrester World Dynamics models. Until Windows, you had to go to a Mac to find a program as good as this. Recommended.

This year, Microsoft has improved both their desktop and laptop mice. I said last issue that their new large-size "tear-drop" desktop mouse is an improvement over the "Dove soap bar" model. Now they have a new Ballpoint mouse, and that, too, is a genuine improvement. Like the previous Ballpoint, this is a thumb trackball mouse that attaches to your laptop keyboard.

You can also attach it to your desktop. If you prefer trackballs to mice, you definitely should look at this. If you're only indifferent, it's still worth a look. The action is smooth, and the mounting is improved over the old Ballpoint mount; while the button placement is nearly ideal, with extremely natural button action.

I got a call from a consultant friend: a client had a system infected with a new virus. I didn't recognize the symptoms, so I gave him the phone number of Alan Solomon's S&S International in England, on the theory that if Dr. Solomon can't fix the problem, no one can. My friend bought a copy of Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, and that did the trick.

It's not time to panic, but there are a lot of wild viruses out there. I routinely check my system every week now. I boot up from a floppy disk that has always been write-protected and run Dr. Solomon's; if you have valuable databases or do important work on your computer, I advise you to do the same.

Software developers who convert DOS applications to Windows should pay a lot of attention to installation details. This was brought home to me when I installed the upgrade of WinMortization Pro from Etter Industries. This useful little program calculates loan and mortgage amortizations and prints reports on them. Easy to use, too.

Then last week I got a Windows version. I decided to update, and trouble started. First, it said I had an obsolete \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\GRID.VBX and offered to replace it. Since I use Windows for Workgroups and don't know what GRID.VBX does, it seemed prudent to tell it not to replace that; I figured I could do that later if necessary. The rest of the installation seemed to go all right, but when I tried to run the program, it said "C:\WINDOWS\THREED.VBX is out of date," and died. Thinking I may have done the installation wrong, I tried again. The result was two programs and two readme icons in the WINMORTPRO program group; the installation program doesn't check to see if those are already present.

I deleted the whole mess and talked to Etter Industries. They had meanwhile talked to Microsoft, because this had happened before. Ap parently, some unknown third-party application is inserting an ancient copy of THREED.VBX in the Windows subdirectory. The remedy is to delete it, because there's a current copy of THREED.VBX in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM subdirectory (where it belongs).

I deleted the superfluous \WINDOWS\THREED.VBX, deleted all traces of WinMortization Pro, and started over. Again, it offered to replace \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\GRID.VBX. I again declined, and the installation went flawlessly; but attempts to launch the program terminated with the message that I had an obsolete GRID.VBX. I decided to install again, this time letting it replace GRID.VBX, which it appeared to do; but trying to launch the program got the same result as before, and once again I had two copies of the program and readme icons in the WINMORT-PRO group box.

Next, try to delete GRID.VBX. You can't. GRID.VBX was, according to Windows, in use. OK, exit Windows. Reset the machine. Copy GRID.VBX to GRID.FOO and nuke the original. Scrub all traces of WINMORTP RO, including the Windows program group. Enter Windows with some trepidation. Since I have no idea what GRID.VBX does, I wouldn't have been surprised if Windows couldn't open Windows without that file, but it did. Install WinMortization Pro yet again. This time, unprompted, it decompressed GRID.VBX and copied it into \WINDOWS\SYSTEM; I presume the previous attempt failed but the installation program didn't notice that. Anyway, all went well.

Microlytics has a Windows version of their pioneering Word Finder thesaurus, and it works quite well with Word for Windows and other Windows word processors. To use it, you select (highlight) a word in your text and then leave your word processor for the desktop, invoke Word Finder, wait for its dialog box to pop up (as a small window superimposed over your text), and click on the "import" button. After you have done that the first time, you can return to your word processor by clicking anywhere on your text, and the next time you need to use Word Finder, just highl ight a word and do Alt-Escape. Word Finder will appear.

All this works, but no better than doing Shift-F7 within Microsoft Word. The synonyms given are about the same, and, as a bonus, with the thesaurus included in Word, you don't highlight the text, just get the cursor into or next to it.

I have long been a fan of Word Finder, and I use the DOS version (along with Definitions/Plus) in Q&A Write when I'm doing first drafts of text. If you're using a word processor with an inadequate thesaurus, Word Finder is the one to get; it integrates nicely with nearly all of them. The Mac version works just fine, too.

There are a lot of Bible programs now. The latest arrival is Holy Bible from Software Marketing. It's for DOS/VGA and takes 11 MB. It comes on seven

3 1/2-inch floppy disks and features the King James Version, with red highlighting, maps, chronology, art files of sacred masterpieces, a concordance with search capability, and a bunch of other stuff. Useful for Bible scholars, and fo r that matter, pretty good browsing for anyone interested in the subject.

I have a whole bunch of books this month. The computer book of the month is from the Hayden Development Group Staff, with contributions from a dozen experts. It's called Everything You Wanted to Know about the Mac (Hayden, 1992), and it's really complete.

Distributed Systems Management by Alwyn Langsford (Addison-Wesley, 1993) is a specialized book for people who find they have to manage computer systems in many locations. Distributed computing is the wave of the future, but it can create unexpected headaches for management. This is a good place to learn about them.

The book of the month is Joel N. Shurkin's Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up (Little, Brown, 1992). Lewis Terman did a great deal of pioneer work in intelligence testing and did studies of gifted children. One of his groups, more than 1500 California children with genius- and near-genius-level IQs, became known as "the Term ites" and were featured in a number of studies. Shurkin is the chief science writer at Stanford University and has a deservedly good reputation for accuracy as well as readability. This book follows the Termites up to the present. If you're interested in gifted children, you'll find this book fascinating.

The game of the month is MicroProse's Master of Orion, which is Reach for the Stars on steroids. It's addicting.

Next month, presentation programs and more on networking, including a test of the new Windows for Workgroups 3.11. As usual, there aren't enough hours in the day.

For More Information

After Dark ($49.95) features Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Contact Berkeley Systems, Inc., 2095 Rose St., Berkeley, CA 94709, (800) 877-5535 or (510) 540-5535; fax (510) 540-5115.

The ATI 14400 ETC modem (ETC I, $249; ETC E, $299) comes with good manuals. It's generally easy to set up. Contact ATI Technologies, Inc.,33 Commerce Valley Dr. E, Thornhill, Ontario, Canada L3T 7N6, (905) 882 -2600; fax (905) 882-2620.

If you do a lot of mousing around, think seriously about the new Microsoft Ballpoint mouse ($125). It really is that good. Microsoft's Win32 SDK (call for price) comes with a CD-ROM chock full of development tools. There's a new version (3.11) of Microsoft's Windows for Workgroups ($249.95) coming out soon. Contact Microsoft Corp., 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052, (800) 426-9400 or (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101.

If you deal with lousy communications, you should use a USRobotics Courier HST Dual Standard modem ($1295). Contact USRobotics, Inc., 8100 North McCormick Blvd., Skokie, IL 60076, (800) 342-5877 or (708) 982-5010; fax (708) 982-5235.

If Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit can't solve your virus problem, nothing can. DOS version, £99; Windows version, £125; OS/2 version, £149). Contact S&S International, Ltd., Berkley Court, Mill St., Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire HP4 2HB, U.K., +44 442 877877; fax +44 442 877882.

Maximum Storage's Duette drive ($ 2790) is the fastest optical drive I've ever seen. Contact Maximum Storage, Inc., 518 North Nevada Ave., Suite 203, Colorado Springs, CO 80903, (800) 843-6299 or (719) 442-6674; fax (719) 442-6671.

If, like me, you sit staring at a computer screen most of your day, you owe it to yourself to get Nanao's FlexScan T560i monitor ($2199). Contact Nanao USA Corp., 23535 Telo Ave., Torrance, CA 90505, (800) 800-5202 or (310) 325-5202; fax (310) 530-1679.

Useful for Bible scholars, Holy Bible ($49.95) is also pretty good browsing for anyone interested in the subject. Contact Software Marketing Corp., 9830 South 51st St., Building A-131, Phoenix, AZ 85044, (602) 893-3377; fax (602) 893-2042.

Master of Orion ($59.95), or Reach for the Stars on steroids. Contact MicroProse, 180 Lakefront Dr., Hunt Valley, MD 21030, (410) 771-1151; fax (410) 771-1174.

The MaxLite 144 fax modem ($299) is slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes and can be battery-powered. Contact Macronix, Inc., 1348 Ridder Par k Dr., San Jose, CA 95131, (800) 858-5311 or (408) 453-8088; fax (408) 453-8488.

Plug-In for Program Manager ($20) enhances the Windows Program Manager without replacing it. Contact Plannet Crafters, Inc., 2580 Runic Way, Alpharetta, GA 30202, (404) 740-9821; fax (404) 740-1914.

If you're traveling, the SupraFaxModem 14400 costs less (for IBM PCs, $229.95; for Macs, $249.95). Contact Supra Corp., 7101 Supra Dr. NW, Albany, OR 97321, (800) 727-8417 or (503) 967-2400; fax (503) 967-2401.

VisSim (Personal VisSim, $495; VisSim, $1495) is a good general-purpose tool for modeling systems. Recommended. Contact Visual Solutions, Inc., 487 Groton Rd., Westford, MA 01886, (508) 392-0100; fax (508) 692-3102.

WinMortization Pro for Windows ($99.95) is about the best program around for doing complex loan amortizations. Contact Etter Industries, Inc., 82 Shoreview Dr., Bedford, Nova Scotia, Canada B4A 1V5, (800) 565-2662 or (902) 835-6060; fax (902) 835-5431.

Word Finder Plus ($39.95) is the thesaurus to get. The Mac version works fine, too. Contact Microlytics, Inc., 2 Tobey Village Office Park, Pittsford, NY 14534, (800) 828-6293 or (716) 248-9150; fax (716) 248-3868.

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Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psychology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writing about computers present and future. Jerry welcomes readers' comments and opinions. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Jerry Pournelle, c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Please put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on the Internet or BIX at jerryp@bix.com .