Orchids and Onions: Part 1

Jerry presents his list of last year's best and worst computer products

Jerry Pournelle

It's time for the annual Chaos Manor User's Choice Awards and the annual Orchid and Onion Parade. I do these now because, unlike the rest of the publishing world that believes a year ends in early November when the January issue goes to bed, I insist that a year isn't over until the end of December. Many products don't come out until the November Comdex, and while I could frantically try to review those, I'd never be able to use them before my deadline for the January issue.

Ground rules: these are my awards. I consult with the other BYTE editors, but I decide. A User's Choice Award means: I've done enough with the product to become familiar with it. I've probably used the product. I certainly like it, and I recommend it as good enough. Nowadays, I seldom pretend to know what is the "best" in any category. There's just too much out there.

When I say I use something, I generally mean it. Despite the many piles of software, Chaos Manor is a small business. I do research, build and test mathematical models of dynamic processes, write programs, write and market science fact and fiction, buy and sell stories for my anthologies, hire consultants, keep books, pay my bills, and do my taxes. I'm always looking for ways to use computers to make my life easier, and that's generally what determines a User's Choice Award.

The User's Choice Award for Operating Systems goes to OS/2 Warp , but a warning goes with it.

OS/2 Warp works just fine for people like my wife. Roberta uses Desqview and DOS programs at present. She really needs Windows, but she doesn't much relish learning it. The only multitasking she does is running communications in the background while she uses a word processo r. OS/2 Warp would let her run a few Windows applications without knowing much about Windows and would be easier to learn than Windows. It's also greatly superior to both Desqview and Windows for task switching among DOS programs.

It would give her good access to the Internet. OS/2 Warp comes with pretty good access tools. The mail program has a miserable user interface and sometimes doesn't properly access the Internet; but the WWW (World Wide Web) browser is pretty cool, anonymous file transfer works well, the news browser isn't bad, and they all work smoothly in the background.

Moreover, OS/2 Warp is stable. Once it's set up properly, it's extremely easy to use. You can nest folders and program groups, set which ones open on start-up and which don't, and, in general, set up buttons to do routine stuff for you. Once all this is done, OS/2 Warp will work reliably and efficiently.

The catch is setting it up.

That doesn't have to be difficult. Some people will have no trouble at all , particularly those who have a CD-ROM drive that OS/2 recognizes; but even the floppy drive version can be installed easily, albeit tediously, if you have the right equipment, even if you don't know much about what you're doing. The lucky ones may then find it simple to access the Internet and join those crowds of smiling people seen in the OS/2 Warp ads as they go network surfing and have a great time of it.

Others won't be so lucky. Some will have equipment incompatibilities. Others--well, I don't know, they just may not hold their mouths right. For whatever reason, installation will be sheer hell. Favorite software packages won't work. The system will crash mysteriously. Perhaps Windows won't work, even though it's your own Windows. Unlike OS/2 2.11, Warp doesn't come with Windows. You'll need to have your own, and, if you're smart, you'll have it working properly under DOS before attempting Warp. Windows generally works fine within Warp--but then everything else generally works just fine, too.

Alas, in a sizable minority of cases, enough goes wrong that unsophisticated users will simply give up on OS/2 Warp. For the rest, those for whom things go easily or who can find knowledgeable people to help them set up OS/2 Warp, the result can be very much worthwhile. Warp is fast. If you normally use your machine for the same thing day after day, you'll probably be better off with OS/2 Warp once you get it up and running.

Another group who will appreciate OS/2 Warp is experimentalists , people who like to play around with their computers to see what will happen. If you're looking for tricks and shortcuts, and you have time for messing about with your system, OS/2 Warp may be ideal. It's far more customizable than Windows, and it prints a lot faster, too, even from Windows programs. When I have to print a 600-page novel, I always use the network to transfer the file to the OS/2 system before letting Word 6.0c for Windows have at it.

You'll notice that I said I transfer the f ile to the OS/2 machine, meaning I don't use that machine for writing, which is true. My primary machine remains Big Cheetah, which is a 486DX2/33 running DOS 5.3, BOOTCON 2.11, QEMM 7.5, Windows for Workgroups, and a DAT (digital audiotape) backup system running under Palindrome's Network Archivist backup software. This is partly due to inertia; but it's also an extraordinarily stable and reliable system.

More to the point, it's very forgiving. That's important, because I am forever installing and removing software on this machine. I have to--the only way I can use something is to have it on the machine I do most of my work on. Alas, some of the software I try doesn't work very well, and it's important that I be able to remove it easily and, in case of a crash, recover quickly. Big Cheetah with the Palindrome DAT fills that bill nicely.

OS/2 Warp doesn't. Once Warp is tuned up and running properly, it's stable and reliable, but my experiences using it as an experimental system haven't been very pleasant. For one thing, you sure don't want to reboot often if you're using OS/2 Warp (or OS/2 2.11 for that matter). It takes longer to reboot Warp on a Pentium system than it does to bring up DOS and Windows on my 486--and if you install as much bad software as I do, you'll find yourself rebooting often.

Of course, most of you don't have to install a lot of bad software, if only because you have me to do that for you; and I do use the Warp machine (an IBM ValuePoint Pentium system) as my primary communications system. It does my MCI mail, BIX, GEnie, and my increasingly complicated Internet transactions. Most DOS games play just fine under Warp; and Warp has a dual-boot feature that makes it very easy to boot up DOS for those games that go directly to the hardware and want the entire system.

OS/2 Warp isn't a perfect product, but for many of us, it's more than good enough; and with those warnings, it gets my User's Choice Award for The Operating Systems.

I've d iscussed BOOTCON in several previous columns. It's a program that lets you reconfigure your DOS system each time you boot up. You can have special configurations for games. Some games insist you have a memory manager like QEMM or EMM386.SYS; others, like Wing Commander 3, are happier if you have no memory manager at all, other than their own. Some games want one sound-card configuration, and some want another. With BOOTCON, you can experiment with new programs without fear of mucking things up beyond repair.

BOOTCON works just fine with OS/2's dual-boot feature. That is, when you boot up DOS, you'll see BOOTCON; when you boot up OS/2, the system will never know it's there. They've recently improved BOOTCON yet again, and it's one of the first things I install when I get a new DOS system. I can't live without it, and if you play games or experiment with DOS configurations, you can't either. BOOTCON gets a User's Choice Award for Utilities.

The most powerful machin e at Chaos Manor is Pentafluge, a Pentium system that's built from a PC Power & Cooling tower case, a Turbo-Cool 300 tower-model power supply, and a Pentacool fan; a Micronics Computers M5Pi motherboard; an ATI Technologies Graphics Pro Turbo Mach 64 graphics card; a Distributed Processing Technology SmartCache III SCSI Host Adapter; and a Digital Equipment DEC 3107 1.05-GB digital hard drive (see my September 1994 column).

We had some software problems getting it set up, and you may recall the one hardware problem when I got peanut shells in the keyboard, resulting in my thinking there was a motherboard failure when there wasn't. Otherwise, it has run quietly and efficiently. Even in midsummer the Pentium chip was plenty cool, mostly because PC Power & Cooling gave a lot of thought to the airflow in the box.

Over the years, I have had a number of machines with power supplies from PC Power & Cooling, and I have not been unhappy at all. It's about time the company got some well-deserved recognition: PC Power & Cooling wins the User's Choice Award for Power Supplies.

Microsoft has made significant improvements to DOS, particularly to the EMM386.SYS memory manager, which has an excellent memory test and does a good job of getting around the 1-MB DOS memory problem. However, as quickly as Microsoft improved it, Quarterdeck moved faster. QEMM 7.5 is more efficient and easier to use than the memory manager you get with DOS. You also get Manifest, a program that tells you quite a lot about how your memory is being used, and a densely written manual that may not be easy to read but is well worth studying. The manual is as good a text on memory and memory management as you'll find anywhere.

I've used Quarterdeck products about as long as the company has existed, and while I sometimes complain about one feature or another, I'd be lost without QEMM. QEMM 7.5 gets the User's Choice Award for Memory Management Utilities.

Quarterdeck also has a littl e Windows shell program that I like a lot. It's a Program Manager replacement called SideBar. While it takes a little getting used to, it's worth the effort to learn it. It's also very OS/2-like. SideBar was my favorite Windows utility of the year, and gets a User's Choice Award in that category.

There are two ways to set up OS/2 Warp. One is with HPFS (High Performance File System); the other is with plain old FAT (file allocation table) of the kind used by DOS. I think some small part of your system has to be FAT, so you can use DOS and Windows. The rest can be HPFS if you like. In my case, I chose to stay with all FAT, because it makes it easy to get back to DOS and Windows. Warp has a dual-boot command that will do just that.

There are advantages to HPFS, particularly when it comes to installing and managing a network. On the other hand, you cannot easily transfer files from the HPFS partition to the FAT partition. Also, if you have a mostly DOS and Windows n etwork (as I do), communications become extremely difficult; this was another reason I stayed with FAT all the way.

This morning I exited OS/2 Warp to boot up DOS. While I had Valiant (the ValuePoint Pentium P5/60) in DOS, I used Golden Bow Systems' Vopt to defrag the system's disk. As you probably know, disk operating systems tend to write files as they find space for them. After a while, the files are splintered into lots of pieces scattered all over the disk. This is known as fragmentation, and it can greatly increase the time needed for file access.

I hadn't actually expected there to be any need for defragging. Valiant has a 500-MB hard drive with fewer than 200 MB of files. Fragmentation generally takes place on full disks. Not this time, though. Vopt shows you a map of the disk before it begins. I was astonished: about half the disk was empty. The other half was jam-packed with thoroughly fragmented files. Anyway, in about 4 minutes, Vopt had the disk neat and orderly again.

OS/2's HPFS doesn't need any disk defragmentation, and there are mixed opinions about whether you want to use a defragger on OS/2 FAT disks. I did, and it doesn't seem to have done any harm; but you're probably better off using Vopt on DOS systems, with or without Windows. Of course, Vopt is a DOS program. It won't work in a DOS window, because Windows keeps some files open, and Vopt needs to get at them all. I use Vopt every week or so when I shut a Windows machine down and restart it. It takes only a few minutes, and sometimes it speeds up disk operations something wonderful.

Golden Bow's Vopt isn't a glamorous product. It just works. I've used it for about five years now. It has always been the safest disk defragger I know of, and it deserves a User's Choice Award.

If you program in BASIC, you need Crescent Software's programming tools. I make no secret of my belief--call it a prejudice if you like--that compiled Microsoft Professional Basic and Visual Basic are the fastest and most reliable ways to get complex DOS and Windows applications up and running. Once you have them running, you may or may not want to look into ways to optimize performance.

Crescent Software's programming tools come in two main varieties. Tested, reliable routines written in BASIC let you add menus, mouse support, and other functions. Routines written in assembly language give you a capability not found in BASIC or greatly speed up functions that are already in BASIC.

If you do program development and don't use BASIC to get things running, you may want to rethink your strategy; if you do use BASIC, you definitely need Crescent Software tools. There are a whole bunch of them, and rather than choosing one, I'm giving a User's Choice Award in Programming Utilities to Crescent Software's whole line.

Zenith pretty well invented practical laptop computers and for a while thereafter dominated the field. The competition caught up and ran past Zenith a few years ago, probably as a result of overmanagement from Groupe Bull. Now the owners have wisely given engineering and development control back to the geniuses at St. Jo, and the result has been spectacular.

When the USS Tripoli was deployed to the Persian Gulf last spring, my son Phillip took a Zenith Z-Noteflex color laptop. Like all new Zenith laptops, it came with Windows and power management utilities.

I had promised Zenith a major torture test of the machine. It got that. For a while, the temperature aboard the Tripoli was high enough to melt paint off interior bulkheads. They went through typhoons. That machine got wet, dropped, overheated, and generally abused.

Two problems developed. Phillip's model has a trackball that attaches externally to the front of the machine. This keeps the laptop smaller, but the detachable trackball is subject to damage; the first one stopped working before they got to sea. The Zenith service department replaced it under warranty, no questions aske d. Phillip reports that the replacement worked throughout the deployment but needed frequent cleaning. Zenith portables come in a slightly larger model with the trackball built in, which makes for a considerably more rugged machine.

Ship's power on a helicopter carrier is unreliable at best. Phillip had a surge suppressor, but the constant power spikes fried it, after which a surge got the power converter. He was able to find another of the proper voltage--it had belonged to a laptop that died in the heat--and used that until a power surge got it. Then one of his crew kludged up yet another power supply, which lasted until they were on the way home, before it too died. Note that the Z-Noteflex itself continued to work just fine through all this.

It's still working. The service department replaced the power supply under warranty, again no questions asked.

Phillip also notes that for the kind of use he put the machine to, it would have been better to have a bit thicker case, even at the cos t of more weight; but barring a couple of chips and scratches, it was strong enough. Few machines are going to go through what that one did.

Meanwhile, I've stopped carrying my ancient Zenith Mastersport monochrome computer, which lasted me four years and went all over the world, including to the Mojave in midsummer. I wouldn't replace it with anything I didn't think equally reliable; but after Phillip's report, I trust the Z-Noteflex. The model I have is larger than Phillip's, and it has PCMCIA slots and an integral trackball. A Data Race RediCard RC-1496 data/fax modem takes up one slot. It works just fine.

One quibble: Zenith seems unable to make little doors that will stay on. The little cover on the PCMCIA slots keeps coming off, as did the cover over the serial and parallel ports on my Mastersport. On the Mastersport, I solved the problem by discarding the cover; the machine never missed it. The PCMCIA slots cover seems a bit more important, so I have applied the standard remedy: duct tape .

My Z-Noteflex has been on half a dozen trips by air and in my Bronco. It has not failed me. I could wish for a bit longer battery life, but I have to say it has never run out of steam on a cross-country flight; and in sleep mode (just close the lid), I can leave it for over a week before it quits.

This isn't the first User's Choice Award for Zenith laptops , and I doubt it will be the last. Zenith makes good PC/Windows portables.

Having said that, the best portable we have is Roberta's Mac PowerBook 540c, which is as powerful as the Quadra. It has great color and sound, and it's just plain elegant. Of course, the only way I can use it is to pry it out of my wife's fingers; she really loves it. Apple's Mac PowerBook 540c wins a User's Choice Award and a Chaos Manor Orchid as well, and this isn't the last you'll hear of it.

The main product at Chaos Manor is words. I got my first computer (Zeke, who is now on display in the Smithsonian Museum of American History) to write books with Electric Pencil. I'm always looking for the perfect word processing software.

I haven't found it yet, so for the moment I use two different systems for writing. For first drafts of shorter works, I use Symantec's Q&A Write for DOS with Quinton Systems' Definitions/Plus, SoftKey International's American Heritage Dictionary, and Microlytics' Word Finder Plus thesaurus, all loaded in a DOS session under Windows. It's what I'm writing this with now.

I use this for historical reasons: Q&A Write was the first really good text editor that incorporated the old WordStar control character system. This was a system in use back before keyboards routinely came with function keys. Many of us used the "WordStar Diamond" so often that we learned it down to the cellular level in our fingers.

Anyway, Q&A Write is a character-based, very fast text editor I find hard to improve on for first drafts, and the combination of the Q&A database and Q&A Write was one of the first "office suites" around. Q&A and Q&A Write are about the easiest to learn of the moderately powerful database and text-editing programs. I wrote lots of books and years of these columns with Q&A Write; but because, alas, Symantec has no intention of improving it, I can't in conscience recommend it any longer.

My other editor is Microsoft Word 6.0 for Windows, which I use for editing and printing. I often use it for creative writing, too. When I do that, I like it just fine, which naturally leads to the question: Why not use it all the time?

I'm used to Q&A Write. I don't often need a dictionary or thesaurus, but when I do, the combination works smoothly and how I want. I also plead efficiency. Somehow it seems like wretched excess to fire up a multimegabyte program like Word 6.0 to dash off a three-line letter. I can use Q&A Write on a DOS notebook or palmtop. Mostly, though, I have to confess it's sheer inertia that keeps me from changing over.

The important thing is that if I had to give up one or the other, I'd give up Q&A Write. Word 6.0 has features I need for productivity. It handles footnotes and end notes. It compares different versions of a document. It does a lot of fancy formatting, allowing me considerable control over layouts. It does faxes, which I can send through WinFax directly from Word. I use Word a lot, and when I do first drafts with it, I like the fact that it changes teh to the (and a whole slew of other trivial error corrections) on the fly.

I had some problems with version 6.0 when it first came out. Actually I had a lot of problems. There were times when I was ready to tear out my hair. Now, though, version 6.0c is quite stable and reliable.

Moreover, Word integrates nicely with Excel and Access. Microsoft has done a nice job of interface design, and the Word/Access combination is as easy to use as the old Q&A/Q&A Write combination, only more powerful. I don't use Excel a lot, once again due to sheer inertia. I got used to SuperCalc when it first came out, and when I need a database, I've managed with Q&A, even though it's only a flat-file manager. Next year, however, I intend to reorganize, and Microsoft Office looks like the right way to go.

The User's Choice Award for Word Processor of the Year goes to Microsoft Word 6.0 for Windows.

Not to crow too loud, but I was about the first writer to recognize the value of CD-ROMs. Of course, the real credit should go to Bill Gates, who not only recognized their importance, but did something about it by hosting the first big CD-ROM conference.

CD-ROMs led to multimedia, and there are a lot of multimedia applications now. Many are games, but there are also lots of multimedia data disks, educational programs, maps, and so forth. There was a time when you could make do with a system with no CD-ROM and sound capabilities, but that time has passed.

Most new systems come with CD-ROM and sound capabilities, but a lot of older ones, some quite powerful, don't have them. As an example, Valiant had neither. Valiant is primarily an OS/2 machine and for much of this year ran OS/2 2.1. A few weeks ago I converted him to OS/2 Warp.

It was simple enough. Valiant already ran OS/2 LAN Server through an Eagle NE2000 Ethernet card, so I used the network to save everything onto a Maxoptix T3-1300 1.3-GB read/write optical disk drive, which is built into Pentafluge. It has always worked flawlessly, so much so that saving to the T3-1300 before trying anything radical has become standard procedure. The Maxoptix drive hangs off the SmartCache III SCSI Host Adapter. It works swiftly and flawlessly, and we don't have to think about it. It certainly deserves a User's Choice Award for Optical Disk Drives.

Once we had all the files saved, I reformatted Valiant's hard disk and installed PC-DOS 6 and the latest version of Windows for Workgroups. A caution here for ValuePoint owners. If you have a ValuePoint Pent ium P5/60 with ATI Technologies' mach32 AX graphics system built onto the motherboard, you must put the statement ACEPLANAR=ON into your WIN.INI file in the section called mach. If you don't, you will never get out of VGA.

Second caution: if you have a network card and W4WG, either be sure your Ethernet connection is working properly or bring up Windows with the /n option to prevent it from trying to start the network. In my case, I had disconnected the Ethernet cable from the back of the machine and later restarted and did "win." The result was a black screen of death, remedied only by reattaching the network cable. It may be that it will eventually reach a time out, but if so, that's a long timer.

Once I had W4WG running properly (including getting the machine connected to the network), I installed OS/2 Warp. Because the machine had no CD-ROM drive, I had to do it from floppy disks. This is tedious but uncomplicated, with one exception. If you have a network card in the system, once you get Wa rp going, you must use System Setup and do a Selective Install to get the adapter card set up. To do that, you have to tell OS/2 Warp what network card you have.

That turned out to be easier to say than do. An Eagle NE2000 card has absolutely no printing on it. If you don't know what kind of card it is, you can't find out by looking at it. Warp doesn't seem to recognize it automatically either.

Fortunately, the dual-boot capability of OS/2 Warp makes it easy to go back to DOS/Windows; and W4WG has, deep within the Windows Setup utility, a way to determine what network card you have. Open Windows Setup and invoke Change Network Settings. From there, open Drivers. In there, open Add Adapter and invoke Detect. The system will trundle for a while and tell you what network card it thinks it sees. W4WG will also set your network card for you (provided you have one that is software-settable; some are hard-wired with jumpers).

If you're installing OS/2 Warp, you will want to write down those sett ings. You can't use W4WG under Warp--not yet anyway--but if you leave the network card in, you still must have it set up right, or you cannot run Windows under Warp.

Another caution about W4WG. When I say it will set your network card for you, I mean it will do it whether you like it or not. When W4WG starts up, it looks for a network card set the way W4WG believes it to be set; if it finds a card with what it thinks are the "wrong" settings, it simply reprograms the card--and it does not tell you about that. You can get some spectacular crashes if W4WG believes your card should be set to some IRQ (interrupt request) or memory address used by another program.

Once I had the network card set, installing Warp was a snap; but I had no network capabilities, other than dual-booting back to DOS/Windows and using the still-working W4WG to transfer files. What I needed was an OS/2 LAN.

Fortunately I had one. Unfortunately, it was on CD-ROM. There was nothing for it. If I wanted to install OS/2 LA N Server, I'd have to put in a CD-ROM drive first.

I decided to try LANtastic for OS/2 first. I had some installation problems, which I can sum up in one sentence. Installing LANtastic on a DOS or Windows system is quite easy with the quick installation; but if you try to do a quick installation as opposed to a custom installation on an OS/2 Warp system, you will regret it. Use custom and pay attention. Also, remember the values your network card is set to.

Given that, LANtastic for OS/2 works. It doesn't work very well. It's fast enough once it establishes contact with a distant machine, but if it looks for and cannot find another machine on the network, it seems to take an eternity for it to recover, although it eventually does.

So long as you're running LANtastic for OS/2 from the OS/2 machine, you'll have no trouble transferring files to and from the machine. However, that's all you can do. If you go to a W4WG machine and try to connect to Valiant (or whatever you have named the OS/2 machine), it won't be able to find it. You can go back to Valiant and send--and receive--files from your W4WG machines, but that's it. If I wanted a full peer-to-peer network, I'd have to install LANtastic in my W4WG machines; otherwise, Valiant was a client but not a server.

That was a lot better than nothing, but it wasn't really convenient.

What I needed was a CD-ROM drive for OS/2. Fortunately I had one. Creative Labs recently sent me a Sound Blaster Multimedia Upgrade Kit, consisting of a double-speed CD-ROM drive, a Sound Blaster 16 card, and a pair of Labtec-powered speakers. It also comes with a lot of software, some of it rather old, but a lot of it excellent.

Installation was astonishingly easy. The drive mounted in Valiant's cabinet without a hitch. I had a problem with the cable. The installation diagram is designed for a different kit, I think, because it induced me to connect the data cable in reverse, with the result that the CD-ROM drive did n't work at all (and no wonder). Once I fixed that, everything went swimmingly, and I now have good CD-ROM and sound capabilities; in a word, Warped Valiant has become a multimedia system.

The sound picture remains confused, and I keep hearing about new developments coming Real Soon Now. That's fine, but you need CD-ROM and sound capabilities right now. The way to get them is with one of Creative's excellent Sound Blaster kits, which work under DOS/Windows even better than under OS/2 Warp. Creative Labs' Sound Blaster Kits get the User's Choice Award for Multimedia Upgrade Kits.

Once I had the CD-ROM drive installed, I put in OS/2 LAN Server. A long story goes with that, too, but I don't have room for it. The short version is, do not use the express or quick installation. Use the custom installation and be prepared for some confusing screens. The express method believes your network board is set to IRQ 3, which isn't a good setting. It offers you no way to tell t he program where the board is really set.

If you give LAN Server the name of a W4WG workgroup--mine is JerryOne--as the domain, it's very easy to make the OS/2 computer part of a W4WG network; I can find Valiant from any machine in the network. It's a fast and smooth process. Incidentally, if you want to defeat the network security, give the guest account system administrator privileges. You do that in the network settings book.

I am out of space, and I haven't got to the Orchids and Onions. For that matter, some of the awards still need to be passed out, so some of this will continue next month.

Two games get User's Choice Awards: MicroProse's XCOM:UFO Defense, which is the best strategy game I've played in a long time, and Origin's Wing Commander 3. WC 3 is awesome, with lots of live-action scenes involving believable characters and a good story line. One warning: there are some missions I just can't manage. I'm told you can complete the game on the winn ing track even though you lose those missions.

Logitech gets a User's Choice Award for its WingMan Extreme joystick. It's the best one I've come across, and I've used a lot of them.

The book of the month is Technological Risk by H. W. Lewis (Norton, 1992). It's about the clearest and best-written exposition on the increasingly important subject of the risks involved with new technologies. It's readable, too. The computer book of the month is by Gary Wolf and Michael Stein, Aether Madness (Peachpit Press, 1994). This is a wacky guide to places to go and things to look at on the Internet. The glossary has readable explanations of ftp, archie, veronica, gopher, and other esoterica, and the main body of the book will tell you about odd stuff indeed.

Next month, Orchids and Onions, a few more awards, and what's new at Chaos Manor.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

I can't live without BOOTCON 2.11 ($49), and if you play games or experiment with DOS configurations, you can't either. Contact Modular Software Systems, Kent, WA, (800) 438-3930 or (206) 631-5781; fax (206) 631-5779.

Crescent Software offers a bunch of programming tools, such as Graphics QuickScreen 1.12 ($149), QuickPak Professional 4.19 ($199), and QuickPak Professional 3.22 for Windows ($199), and I'm giving a User's Choice Award in Programming Utilities to the whole line. Contact Crescent Software, Inc., Ridgefield, CT, (800) 352-2742 or (203) 438-5300; fax (203) 431-4626.

So long as you're running LANtastic for OS/2 (per node, $139; five-user pack, $629; 10-user pack, $1119; 25-user pack, $1919; 50-user pack, $3129; 100-user pack, $4995) from an OS/2 machine, you'll have no trouble transferring files to and from the machine. Contact Artisoft, Inc., Tucson, AZ, (800) 233-5564 or (602) 670-7100; fax (602) 670-7101.

T he Mac PowerBook 540c (base price, $4299) has great color and sound, and it's just plain elegant. Contact Apple Computer, Inc., Cupertino, CA, (800) 776-2333 or (408) 996-1010; fax (904) 584-7481.

Microsoft Word 6.0 for Windows ($339) handles footnotes and end notes, compares different versions of a document, and does a lot of fancy formatting and faxes. Contact Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, (800) 429-9400 or (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101.

OS/2 Warp 3 for Windows (less than $80) and OS/2 Warp 3 Full Pack Edition (less than $130) aren't perfect, but for many of us they're more than good enough. Contact IBM Corp., Austin, TX, (800) 342-6672 or call your local IBM dealer.

I'd be lost without QEMM 7.5 ($99.95), and SideBar ($59.95) was my favorite Windows utility of the year. Contact Quarterdeck Office Systems, Santa Monica, CA, (800) 354-3222 or (310) 392-9851; fax (310) 314-4217.

Th e way to get CD-ROM and sound capabilities right now is with a Sound Blaster Multimedia Upgrade Kit ($340 to $599). Contact Creative Labs, Inc., Milpitas, CA, (800) 998-1000 or (408) 428-6600; fax (408) 428-6611.

The 1.3-GB, multifunction T3-1300 optical disk drive (with 4 MB of cache memory: internal, $2999; external, $3285) works swiftly and flawlessly, and we never have to think about it. Contact Maxoptix Corp., San Jose, CA, (800) 848-3092 or (408) 954-9700; fax (408) 954-9711.

The most powerful machine at Chaos Manor is Pentafluge, a Pentium system that includes a PC Power & Cooling tower case ($279), Turbo-Cool 300 tower-model power supply ($179), and Pentacool fan ($29). Contact PC Power & Cooling, Inc., Carlsbad, CA, (800) 722-6555 or (619) 931-5700; fax (619) 931-6988.

Vopt 4.02 ($59.95) has always been the safest disk defragger I know of. Contact Golden Bow Systems, Inc., San Diego , CA, (800) 284-3269 or (619) 298-9349; fax (619) 298-9950.

Wing Commander 3 ($65 to $75) is awesome, with lots of live-action scenes involving believable characters and a good story line. Contact Origin Systems, Inc., Austin, TX, (800) 245-4525 or (512) 335-5200; fax (512) 331-9558.

The WingMan Extreme ($69.95) joystick is the best one I've come across, and I've used a lot of them. Contact Logitech, Inc., Fremont, CA, (800) 231-7717 or (510) 795-8500; fax (510) 792-8901.

XCOM: UFO Defense (price not available) is the best strategy game I've played in a long time. Contact MicroProse Software, Hunt Valley, MD, (800) 879-7529 or (410) 771-1151; fax (410) 771-1174.

My Z-Noteflex (8 MB of RAM, dual-scan screen, PCMCIA slots, and an integral trackball, $3379) has been on half a dozen trips by air and in my Bronco. It has never failed me. Contact Zenith Data Systems Corp., Buffalo Grove, IL, (800) 533-0331 or (708) 808-5000; fax (708) 808-4482.

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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 .