st machine in the house. Roberta uses it heavily, and it w
orks just fine. We'll get to the CD-ROM makers Real Soon Now.
The exception is interesting. The fastest machine in the house appears to be the Diamond Flower Doubleshot 133 dual-Pentium system running under Windows NT 4.0.
Of course, this business of what's fastest depends greatly on what you're doing with the machine. If you run a lot of DOS programs and make heavy use of network resources, dual-processor systems with NT 4.0 are a pretty clear win. If you're heavily into graphics, the speed you get depends as much on the video board as the CPU, but even so, a good dual-processor system will probably be a win. Certainly, the Intergraph TDZ-400 was, while we had it, by far the fastest system at Chaos Manor.
I haven't had any problems with NT 4.0, but I keep reading about incompatibilities. Apparently, Quicken users have to go through weird and arcane rituals to get America's favorite financial product to work with NT 4.0.
Meanwhile, just as I was about ready to write off OS/2 d
ue to lack of IBM's support for it, friends inside IBM tell me that a symmetric-multiprocessing (SMP) version of OS/2 Warp Server has just been released. I also hear that SMP for Merlin is in alpha testing and could be released about the first of the year. There are some problems with applications I'll get to later, but support for multiple processors could put OS/2 back in the ball game: speed and stability in one package.
In many cases, however, it won't matter: the speed advantages are real, but you don't much care because you don't notice a saving of a couple of seconds. Under my new writing system, I write upstairs in what used to be Alex's room, using a standard Gateway 2000 486DX2/66 running Microsoft Word 6.0c.
I have a bit over 200 pages -- 70,000 words -- finished. Another 10 pages of notes are tacked on at the end, meaning that when I write, I'm pushing those words down to make room for new text. Every now and then, there's just enough drag that I notice it, but it's fast enough that I don'
t really care.
Although Word has a fast-save option, it's something I don't use. I have Word set to save the whole document and keep a backup copy every time I save (which I strongly advise you to do). Moreover, I began writing with computers back in CP/M days, and I developed the habit of saving early and often, generally at the end of every paragraph.
This means saving the entire 70,000 words of the manuscript every minute or so; and that works just fine, taking no more than a few seconds. In other words, fast enough is fast enough.
Things continue to happen at Chaos Manor.
A few days ago, we went to the gala opening of the new Los Angeles Opera season. It was
I Pagliacci
, directed by Franco Zeffirelli and starring Placido Domingo. Wonderful: more like a modern musical than a grand opera.
While we were out, Alex came over, and he opened all the windows in my regular office. I've got air conditioning in the monkish cell where I now write, but when I came there in the
afternoon, I didn't bother to button up and start the air conditioning, so it got pretty hot up there. Then on Sunday, the one day I don't work on my novel, I came up from breakfast to find a "blue screen" on Cyrus, the Cyrix 6x86-P166. This one announced that it had been unable to write to drive C. I'd seen that screen before and assumed that it probably was generated by System Agent or First Aid 95 Deluxe doing some kind of routine background check and getting hung up on the screen saver.
The screen said press any key to continue, and when I did, all seemed well.
One of the programs I scheduled for this month's column is DiskMapper, from Micro Logic, the company that publishes Info Select. DiskMapper gives you a visual picture of what's on your hard drive. It does this by calculating the size of each file, subdirectory, and directory, including "free space," which it shows as one big directory. Then it puts up a map in which each directory and subdirectory appears as a rectangle whose area is propo
rtional to the space it takes up on your drive. You can then click on those, and it will expand that area to a new level. The result is that you can see at a glance just what's eating your disk space.
DiskMapper works just fine with all kinds of hard drives, including removable drives. It also works with networked drives, but it is a bit slow with them. When DiskMapper is running on a Windows 95 (Win 95) drive and looks across the network at a large NT drive, it gets a little confused. It seems to map everything all right, but it reports the total drive size wrong.
I had DiskMapper installed on Pentafluge, a Pentium 60 system. Pentafluge has been my main machine for some time, but he's a bit out of date, and I'm contemplating changing systems. One candidate is Cyrus, and one step in the process is transferring Pentafluge's essential software, which includes utilities like DiskMapper.
Running DiskMapper showed that a game called Heroes of Might and Magic took up a humongous chunk of space on Cyrus.
Heroes is one of those games I thought I'd like, but it didn't hold up. Some years ago, Chris Crawford said that good computer games need "the illusion of winnability": the game ought to be too hard for you, but you shouldn't know that. I presume he was thinking of arcade games like Space Invader, where no matter what you do, there's always another level that's even tougher. I prefer "the illusion of losability": I like to win, not be defeated.
Anyway, Heroes seems to follow Crawford's philosophy. Eventually, I went after it with a disk editor to give myself more money and larger armies. I discovered that while the game got tougher and tougher, it got no more interesting. Each new episode had the same features as the last, just arranged differently, with added silliness such as maze-like forests and hedgerows to make everything take three times as long. One day I just quit playing it. Now it was taking up a lot of disk space.
I never throw anything away. The simplest thing I could have done would hav
e been to keep my highest-level save and throw the rest away, on the theory that I could always reinstall the game. Instead, I used Drag and File for Windows 95/NT (DF95/NT) to "move" the entire Heroes directory (and subdirectories) across the network to a Micropolis 4-GB hard drive running under Windows NT.
That was a big mistake.
DF95/NT has the neat feature that you can tell it to copy (or move) only updated files, so when you're copying an enormous directory, you don't have to copy anything that's already been copied. Moreover, you can install DF95/NT on a server and run it locally. It's a good utility for copying, but I don't recommend it for
moving
files. In fact, I don't recommend
moving
files at all. Copy them, and when you know you have a good copy, erase the originals. That takes a little longer, but it's a
lot
safer.
If you do move files, don't use DF95/NT because it doesn't recover gracefully from disk errors; and I got a disk error. About 90 percent through
the move, I got the blue screen: Unable to Write to Drive C, Press Any Key to Continue. Alas, pressing any key didn't continue. Pressing any key got a partial restart of DF95/NT, but that program was completely confused. It trundled for a second, and then the system locked up completely. Ungood.
Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing, nor did anything else, so I hit the reset button. This time a new message appeared: "No Operating System." Double ungood.
Turn it off and let it sit awhile, something I should have done in the first place. Sometimes reset doesn't erase all the cache memory. This time, Win 95 came up, but just as it was completing its start-ups, I got a new blue-screen error. Double plus ungood. I turned the system off before more damage was done.
Heat, I thought. A couple of my advisers had wondered about the airflow in Cyrus, and it was over 90° in the office, uncomfortable enough that I was about to turn on the air conditioning. I decided to put that off; I might as well finish this under the co
nditions I started with.
I have a box labeled Panic. It includes several flavors of DOS boot floppy disks. I fished out one and turned on the power. Cyrus came up just fine. I ran CHKDSK on C, and sure enough, there were a number of errors, which I did
not
let CHKDSK fix. Time for more potent magic.
One essential item in my Panic box is Norton Utilities for Windows 95 Emergency Disk (Bootable). I put it in the floppy drive, turned off the power, counted 10, and fired up the system again. Norton Disk Doctor (NDD) appeared and found there was no file-allocation-table (FAT) entry for the subdirectory HEROES. Apparently, the "Unable to Write" error happened while DF95/NT was trying to update the FAT after deleting a file or subdirectory. NDD fixed the problem and scanned the disk for media surface errors. It found none.
Now Win 95 loaded correctly. The next step was to run Golden Bow's Vopt. It's not that I don't trust the Norton defrag program, but over the years, I have come to have full co
nfidence in Golden Bow utilities. Moreover, although Vopt is a 32-bit program, it shuts down Win 95 and runs itself from DOS to assure complete control over disk writes. Sure enough, in the course of defragging the C drive, Vopt reported a write error. I told it to retry. Everything went well, but it sure seemed like there was a weak sector on that disk. Back in Win 95, I tried NDD complete with media scan, but it reported nothing.
Vopt used to come with a program called Vmarkbad. It found and marked bad sectors; alas, the newest version did not appear to have that. I later discovered it was still there but had been renamed Vscan. In any case, I had already moved on to the next step, which was to try Win 95's ScanDisk utility. I ran ScanDisk, and when I did, Lo!, it found a bad sector, which it marked. To be sure of that, I ran Vmap, which comes with Vopt, and sure enough, one sector now sported a little red bad-sector mark. If you don't have the Vopt utilities, they're worth having.
It was now hot en
ough that I figured to heck with tests, so I closed all the windows and started up the air conditioning. Then I ran all kinds of programs on Cyrus. I deleted the rest of the HEROES subdirectory. I ran Golden Bow's null file detector, discovering that both Microsoft Office and Corel Office Professional 7 create beaucoup empty files as well as directories. I killed off a lot of null files, did extensive disk operations, and let it run overnight. So far, all is well.
I still don't know if my "Unable to Write" blue-screen errors were caused by that soft sector on the disk, or by the hot weather, or whether the heat caused the disk error. I do know that once again NDD was a lifesaver, and it's worthwhile having the bootable Norton Utilities for Windows 95 Emergency Disk in my Panic box. On the other hand, NDD didn't find the bad sector, whereas ScanDisk did.
A final note: I didn't panic, because everything important had been backed up across the network, with really important work copied in at least two pl
aces. A backup system is no good unless you'll use it. It's easy to get in the habit of copying to a networked drive.
Usually, I'm sure the Internet wasn't designed to drive me crazy,
but there are times when I wonder.
One of the most useful utilities ever written was Norton Commander. It's a DOS program that was useful from its first days and just kept getting better and better. For me, it became so indispensable that it was almost always the first thing I installed on a new computer.
Norton Commander is primarily a smart file manager. It also contains built-in viewers for a number of file formats, a utility editor that makes altering CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT a snap, and a bunch of other stuff.
The final version even had a routine that would automatically call MCI and get your e-mail. That feature is obsolete now -- it worked only at 2400 bps anyway -- but I still use Norton Commander for nearly everything else. Alas, it has to run in a DOS window, and it doesn't understan
d long filenames.
The last time I wrote about Norton Commander, a number of readers advised me that there's a shareware program called Windows Commander, written by Christian Ghisler. It's similar to Norton Commander, and it understands long filenames.
This morning, I decided I'd look for Windows Commander. I first tried a search on "Commander" from EarthLink Network's home-page search system. I got 12,000 hits, and the first 20 all had to do with the game Wing Commander. Time to be a bit more selective. The AltaVista search engine accepts search strings in the form Windows +Commander, where the plus sign means that both words must be found. That still produced about 2000 hits, but the first 20 clearly referred to shareware programs that were called Windows Commander. Alas, they also contained lots of odd characters and numbers in place of text in their summaries.
My first thought was that all that garbage was due to unsupported fonts. It sure would be nice if AltaVista would add a feature that le
t you force searches in one language only.
Due to sloth, I have been using Netscape Navigator 2.0. Clearly, it was time to upgrade to version 3.0 and see if that would make a difference.
Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0 is a 6-MB self-extracting file. It takes a while to download. Alas, I hadn't turned off my screen saver when I began the download; about 2 MB into the process, the screen saver kicked in. When I got back in control, Navigator said "Document Done" at the bottom, and there was a 2.2-MB file in my TEMP subdirectory, with no indication that anything had gone wrong. If I hadn't known that the file was supposed to be larger than that, I would have thought all was well. Of course, I'd have found out when I tried to run it.
There was nothing for it but to start over. I got distracted and forgot to turn off the screen saver before I started, but this time I made sure to wiggle the mouse every few minutes. I wished mightily that Win 95 had the Don't Sleep feature from Berkeley's screen savers. I
realize that Win 95 is multitasking, and I probably could have turned off the screen saver while downloading in the background. I guess deep down, however, I don't trust multitasking and Internet downloads, and it wasn't that hard to wiggle the mouse every few minutes. Anyway, it downloaded just fine. Now to install it.
Navigator wants you to shut down everything, including the Internet connection, while you install its upgrade, after which it wants to get back on the Internet to call home, report what you've done, and download some more parts. It also offers you all kinds of options for plug-ins and accessories. The process is pretty straightforward unless you want to pay for the upgrade; to do that, you have to fill out a screen form, and part of the form is off the bottom of the screen. The "CONTINUE" button is on the top of the screen, and there is absolutely no indication that you haven't filled everything out. I tried to pay three times before I figured out that I had to scroll the screen.
Event
ually I had Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0 installed, and I have to say it's pretty snappy.
Next thing was to find Windows Commander. I remembered that one reader had given me site addresses, and I was able to find that e-mail in my archive. One site is
http://www.shareware.com
, and it's very much worth knowing about, being an enormous collection of Mac, DOS, and Windows 3.x, 95, and NT freeware and shareware. It includes Windows Commander, which is a 600-KB ZIP file.
A Hot Night at the Opera
