for prime time.
My Cyrix 6x86-P166 system is full up: every int
errupt request (IRQ) but one was used for something. I needed to add a network card. The one I chose was Applied Creative Technology's Ultimate PCI-3000 Ethernet Card, which is Plug and Play-ready. It has the advantage that in addition to the normal 10Base-T outlet, there's an "EZ" Ethernet connector, which you can daisy chain to another Ultimate PCI-3000. I went into the Cyrix BIOS, enabled Plug and Play, installed the network card, and brought up the system.
The network card worked fine, but Plug and Play moved the Creative Labs Sound Blaster ISA-bus sound card from IRQ 5 -- where it belongs (many DOS games in particular expect it to be there) -- to IRQ 10 and put the modem at IRQ 5. That's no good. The Sound Blaster will work at IRQ 10 for Windows stuff, but DOS programs won't be able to find it.
Back to the BIOS. I set the PCI slot where the network card lives to IRQ 9, the Adaptec SCSI controller board's slot to IRQ 10, and the Matrox MGA Millennium video board's slot to IRQ 11. Doing that is
simple; learning how to do it is tedious, involving poking about with BIOS settings. The important thing about spelunking your BIOS is that you keep a really good log of what you're doing so you can recover when you muck something up. One of Pournelle's laws is that the relentless application of logic will solve most problems; it proved to be the case this time, too.
Once I learned how to work on the Cyrix BIOS settings, I took the internal modem card out and started over. This time, Plug and Play put the Sound Blaster card at IRQ 5. I disabled a COM port, freeing up that IRQ slot, and put the modem back in. That worked, and the modem card took over the disabled COM2 port's IRQ and now works as COM2. Then I quickly disabled Plug and Play before anything could change its mind. The system is now stable.
I've had to do much the same thing with our Gateway 2000 Pentium systems, which also tend to come full up with equipment and features. Once again, spelunking the BIOS is largely a matter of keeping
good records and exercising patience.
Gateway 2000 systems work well: Roberta's new machine is a Gateway 2000 P5-200XL, and she loves it. More on that next month.
In theory, Windows 95 lets you set IRQ assignments. In practice, however, if you enable PCI Plug and Play and Win 95 Plug and Play, they will fight it out, and the results may not be what you want. With patience and luck, you can get things working -- both the Cyrix and Gateway 2000 systems are working wonderfully now -- but it can be a struggle. Your best weapon in that fight is a good logbook. Get in the habit of keeping good notes, and don't make them on an old envelope, which you will inevitably lose. Buy a hardbound composition book and keep your records in that. If you do record something on an old envelope, tape the envelope into the permanent log. I guarantee you'll be glad you did.
We have Windows NT running on two machines now.
Version 3.51, which looks and feels a lot like Windows 3.11, is running on Spi
rit, a dual-Pentium 120. Spirit boasts a Micropolis external 4-GB drive as well as a Digital Equipment 4-GB internal drive. It's the main network server for Chaos Manor. It has been running NT for months now and has never been shut down.
When we set up Spirit, we attached it to an American Power Conversion Smart-UPS (uninterruptible power supply) 700, but we didn't have the cable and software to make it smart. There weren't any problems. APC was supposed to send the cable and software, but instead they sent an entire new unit. We thought about that for a minute, took the cable and PowerChute Plus software, and installed them on the existing Smart-UPS 700. Installation was simple; you don't need to shut down or restart. Then we tested the system by yanking the plug. I also did rapid on-off flicks on the power-strip switch the Smart-UPS 700 is plugged into. Everything works fine.
PowerChute Plus will also run diagnostics on the UPS and log the results, or you can run them on command. We deliberately
set the date a day ahead and ran some tests. Naturally, the log showed the test date as a day ahead of reality. Then I reset the date properly. The log didn't change, but when I ran the diagnostics again, it updated the "latest event" to the correct date. The log also shows the "blackout" events from our tests.
The software will run tests as scheduled events in the background, and if there's any indication that the batteries need servicing or the system needs any other attention, it will signal you. All told, this is the simplest and most painless UPS installation I've seen.
There's only one problem. The Smart-UPS 700 causes the server to broadcast messages to all the workstations announcing that the server is now under battery power. It sent the messages loud and clear to a Diamond Flower Doubleshot 133 running a beta version of NT 4.0. They went just fine to a Cheetah 486DX2/25 running NT 3.51 and to a Pentium 90 running OS/2 Warp Connect. Whatever you're doing, including in a DOS program, up p
ops the message that "Spirit is running on battery power and will shut down in 4 minutes and 50 seconds." When you plug the UPS back in, the message goes out that normal power has been restored. This is as it should be.
Unfortunately, that message does not go to workstations running Windows 3.11 or Win 95, even if they're logged in to Spirit. They remain in total ignorance of the impending failure of the server. We weren't sure why this was or if anything could be done about it. I now find that Win 95 doesn't have any mechanism for receiving the broadcast messages.
Otherwise, the Smart-UPS 700 with PowerChute Plus is the easiest server protection I know of. There are many UPSes out there, and I have no way of knowing which are best. I do have experience with Clary and APC UPSes, and I can say with confidence that both companies' products are good enough, and the APC software is the best I've seen. If your work is at all valuable and you're not using a UPS, you are taking needless risks. Get one.
I wish people would stop improving things.
I don't do a lot of fancy stuff with faxes. I have an old-fashioned curly fax machine downstairs. It's connected to its own phone line and nothing else. Most of the time when we want to send a fax, we take a sheet of paper, put it in the machine, dial the number, press Start, and walk away. It does the job. It also receives on horrible curly paper, which drives me nuts, but most of the faxes I get aren't anything I want anyway.
Sometimes I need something different. When I finish my column, I try to send an advance copy to anyone I've written about, with the invitation to correct me if I'm wrong. My cover letter says I'll correct errors of fact, I'll listen to arguments about errors of judgment, and I reserve the right to decide which is which. For years, I did that mostly by mail, but that seems a bit silly. After all, the documents exist in my computer, the computer has a fax modem, and most companies have a fax number. Then for a w
hile, I got involved in testimony to Congress on space policy, and that turned out to be easier done by fax than by mail.
The result was that I installed Symantec's WinFax and ran the macro program to add it to my File menu in Microsoft Word. That version of WinFax wasn't written for Win 95, but it worked pretty well until one day I had to reinstall Win 95. After that, WinFax didn't work very well. Finally, one night when I had to send a fax to NASA headquarters, it wouldn't work at all.
I printed the document and sent it with the old fax machine, but I did miss the convenience of sending faxes directly from my computer. Thus, I got WinFax Pro 7.0, which is supposed to run with Win 95. Then I made the mistake of trying to do an upgrade installation. That is, I didn't remove the old (and somewhat broken) WinFax, I just installed the new version over it.
The result was a complete failure, remedied only by doing an uninstall from the Add/Remove Programs icon in the Control Panel, and even that
didn't get it all. I had to use FirstAid 95 Deluxe and go in with fire and sword to get rid of the last components. Even then, I had to do some modification of the Microsoft Word Normal template.
That's the bad news. The good news is that once I did that, I was able to install WinFax Pro 7.0 with a minimum of trouble. Then I ran the Word macro -- there are two, one for Word 6, the other for Word 7 -- and now I can write a document in Word, invoke WinFax from the File menu, and send the fax. There's a new "improved" notebook that for reasons I don't understand requires me to insert the 1 in any long-distance number I dial -- the old version understood I was in area code 818 and acted accordingly -- and it all seems more complicated than it used to be, but actually it works quite well. I've sent about a dozen faxes, including a couple to my downstairs machine, and everything has worked smoothly.
Moreover, WinFax will do a good job of answering the phone and receiving faxes. The OCR reader works quit
e well to take an incoming document and turn it into Microsoft Word text. I don't use that feature very much just now, but I will in the future when I have my firewall protection set up.
I'll be glad to be rid of curly faxes. With WinFax on the job, I can look at faxes on-screen, file the useful ones, and print only the very few that need to go in a paper file. It's about time I rationalized that part of my business, and it looks like WinFax is going to let me do it.
WinFax Pro 7.0 goes back on my recommended list, provided you understand that you take your chances trying to do an upgrade installation. Symantec says it ought to have worked, and they don't understand why it didn't. Neither do I, and I'm prepared to believe I had my system messed up worse than most people have theirs, but I still don't recommend upgrade installations. Go into Control Panel and remove your old version. Then do the new installation.
Otherwise, recommended.
I have two reasons to be concerned about s
ecurity here.
First, given my readership, there are a lot of people out there capable of remarkable feats with computers; and some will think it a great joke if they can get into my system and leave me a message in, say, the draft of my current novel.
Perhaps that's not too likely, but then neither is what happened at PC Expo. The editorial staff had met to decide the winners of the BYTE Best of PC Expo Awards. The meeting ran until about 2:00 a.m.: we take those awards seriously. Eventually, we had chosen all the winners, and it was time to write them up. My own part was done quickly, and I bugged out just as I heard some complaints about lost files.
The next morning, I found I'd escaped just in time: all four of the BYTE laptops had become infected with the Word Macro Concept virus. This virus has the effect of saving documents as Template files, and if you don't know how to deal with it, the result can be quite frustrating. It's also a cross-platform virus -- it can spread to Macs, too
-- and worse, it can infect your system through a downloaded file despite a number of precautions. It's not all that vicious. Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, Norton AntiVirus, and other antivirus tools will get rid of it for you, and the versions I've seen do no permanent damage provided you don't panic and erase something yourself. Still, the notion of the BYTE editors -- who collectively know ever so much more about this stuff than I do -- getting burned with a virus is a little frightening.
I've never had one of my machines infected, although I have been given infected disks. This is largely because we run most new programs on a machine not connected to the network, nothing I have answers the telephone, and we run Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit every time there's a new edition and sometimes more often.
If you don't have a good antivirus program, you probably ought to get one. Alan Solomon no longer runs S&S Software International, the company that publishes Dr. Solomon's, and he was the ma
in reason for my high confidence in that product. It's still good. So is Norton. Get something reliable, though. It's time.
One of these days, game designers are going to understand
that converting strategy games to arcade games does no good and a lot of harm. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness are really enjoyable medieval fantasy games; but when Blizzard Entertainment decided to add extensions to the games, instead of making them more interesting, they made them nearly impossible.
The scenarios in Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal are not only difficult because you don't have enough force, but the game has become Whack-A-Mole. You can't give orders when the real-time action is paused, and even at the slowest setting, you cannot possibly pay attention to two fronts at once. Meanwhile, the enemies become both numerous and powerful, the frustration level rises, and eventually it's no fun at all. Finishing becomes a matter of grim determination and teeth
grinding, with no time to stop and look over the situation, no way to play a strategy, and nothing for it but to save, get lucky, save, get unlucky, restore and try again, save, etc. All semblance of role playing is gone at this point. So is all the fun.
I did win, of course. I used Norton Disk Editor to increase the amount of gold and lumber I start with, thus taking one of the vulnerabilities out of the game: with lots of resources, you can build cannon towers to hide behind until you get a decent-size army. Take that, game designers!
But I do wish game designers would understand that some of us don't have the reflexes of teenage fanatics, and if we'd wanted to play arcade games, we'd have gotten an arcade game. Meanwhile, arcade players find hyped-up strategy games boring. I have no doubt they'll sell a lot of the Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal extensions simply because Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness were so enjoyable, but my advice on the extension set is to
buy Strategic Simulations' Fantasy General. When that one gets difficult, it's because you made a bad decision, not because you're trying to fight what in the real world would be an all-day battle, but in the game world is about 3 minutes flat.
Product Information
Fantasy General...........................$40
Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA
Phone: (800) 601-7529 or (408) 737-6800
Fax: (408) 737-6814
Internet:
http://www.ssionline.com
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Back to the BIOS -- Again
