ten say, "I installed. It worked just fine. Recommended." However, that goes by so fast you might not pay attention.
Take the Alps MD-2010 Photo-Realistic Color Printer I mentioned last month. This is a
giant
step up in quality from your random $300 printer. It continues to work splendidly, turning out extremely high-quality color print that's waterproof -- I've put more than one under the tap, and there's no ink run at all. Fade-resistant color prints hung in the sun haven't faded in a month, and that's a lot longer than many color prints last in bright light. It's relatively cheap compared to other top-quality print processes. The color quality is high, it takes close inspection to see banding, and you can print on both sides of th
e (expensive high-quality) paper without any bleed-through.
The MD-2010 is a really good printer, quite good enough to use for making "concept" presentations and an exhibition portfolio. You could use this to sell a publisher on an illustrated book, for example. At its best, the prints are good enough to hang on the wall.
We have only two complaints. First, there are no Windows NT drivers. Alps claims they'll have those in June, if not sooner.
Second, you can't do production work on it. That's not because of speed: the printer is certainly slow, but that wouldn't matter if you could queue up a bunch of jobs and let it run all night. The problem is that after a few jobs, it heats up and the color balances change, and you have to let it cool off for a minute or so. This would be easily remedied through software inserted into the print driver. Insert the delay and have a dialog box: "Pause 60 seconds before each new print?" Queue the jobs, check "Yes," and Bob's your uncle.
We have the scanner ve
rsion, the Alps MD-4000. It's a sheet feeder, and it works. Alas, in setting it up, we broke one of the color ribbons. I haven't replaced it yet, so I can't compare input to output before column deadline. Next month for sure. By then, with luck I'll also have a flatbed color scanner for more comparisons.
While I was typing the first part of this column,
I was getting "hesitations." They weren't as bad as the infamous hesitations I chased for months before finding their cause, but they were bad enough. I could also hear my hard drive chattering continuously. Both were sufficiently annoying that I thought I'd better do something.
First, I closed all programs except Word. That didn't help a bit, so I closed Windows and reopened it. That did no good either. I still got hesitations as I typed, and my hard drive was trundling madly. Could this be drive fragmentation? In desperation, I closed Word and invoked Golden Bow Systems' Vopt 95. Unlike the Windows Plus defragmentation programs, Vopt
95 insists on running from DOS if it's going to work on the drive where Windows resides: it shuts your system down so that it has exclusive control of the drive. Despite running from DOS, Vopt 95 understands long filenames and has no trouble with them.
Invoking Vopt 95 showed my drive was hideously fragmented, and it took 6 minutes to repack it. That done, I restarted Win 95 and Word, and lo!, the hesitations stopped.
After I went through the install/uninstall farce with WinFax (see the regular column for details), I noticed hesitations and drive churning again, not as bad as before, but discernible. This time, I went straight to Vopt 95. It showed the drive was fragmented again -- apparently my original WinFax installation had been all over the drive -- and did its thing, after which the hesitations ceased and haven't returned. Vopt 95 also found about a hundred empty (zero-length) files in the WinFax directory; they were presumably created when WinFax tried unsuccessfully to deal with my Word 7.0 d
ocument. I erased them.
There are a lot of drive defragger programs out there. I suppose most of them work, but I'm partial to Vopt. I've used one or another version of Vopt since DOS 3.x days, and I've never lost a byte of data due to the program. Vopt 95 is safe, fast, and efficient, and it sure stopped this latest round of hesitations. Recommended.
The real question is, what was all that frantic drive activity, since the only window open was Word 7.0?
It turns out that when you install the Microsoft Office 95 Suite that contains Word 7.0 (or Office 97), you also install an indexing program called Find Fast. This is a stealth program: I have found no real documentation for it. Three enormous dead-tree monuments -- Office 95 books published by Que, New Rider, and Microsoft Press -- contain not one word about it. There's a Find Fast icon in the Control Panel with an unhelpful message pointing you to the help file of any Office 95 application. Those don't tell you a lot more.
Find Fast makes
automatic indexes of documents. There are in theory ways to tell it which documents to operate on. I've never used those; indeed, until a couple of hours ago, I wasn't aware that Find Fast existed. More on this program another time. For the moment, be aware that it is turned on by default when you install Office, and if your hard drive is badly fragmented, it can really slow things down for all your other applications.
I've been wondering about some kind of caching program to smooth out the effects of drive fragmentation, but I haven't chosen one yet because Win 95 makes that pretty hard to do. NT solves that problem by automatically using free memory as a cache. Win 95 is supposed to do that sort of thing, but since Win 95's Task Manager (unlike NT's) doesn't show processes or RAM in use, it's hard to tell what is going on. If you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del (once!), the Close Program dialog box will give you a sort of process list that includes Find Fast, but not a lot more information. Meanwhile, Vopt 95 has take
n care of the problem for the moment.
NT 4.0 comes with Find Fast. While I don't have much experience running applications like Word 7.0 on NT, I do know that NT hard drives can get fragmented on both file allocation table (FAT) and NT File System (NTFS). Vopt 95 doesn't work on NT. What does work is Executive Software's Diskeeper 2.0 for Windows NT. We weren't able to install Diskeeper on our oldest NT system running off a DPT controller, but there was no difficulty at all installing it on our new Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 -- for much more on that system, see the regular May column.
Diskeeper is good stuff, and so far as I know, it's the only choice worth mentioning for defragmenting NT drives. It ships with both versions 3.51 and 4.0 on one disk. There are NT Workstation and NT Server versions, and one won't do the other's job. The Server version is considerably the more expensive of the two. Diskeeper runs on all platforms worth mentioning, including Alpha, and we suspect it would work o
n our old DPT-controller system if we'd bother getting the latest and greatest drivers.
I suppose I had a fit of pique.
After using it for a month, I find that Norton Commander for Windows 95 and NT is very much worth having, and really deserves my User's Choice Award. This version of Commander won't install unless you already have a previous version of Commander on your system; but if that previous version is Commander 4.0 for DOS, that's all to the good. Win 95 Commander installs into the Program Files directory and leaves the DOS version intact. You should leave them both up, renaming the new one Commander 95 or some such. You might even use an icon editor to alter the little Navy hat icon by putting a 95 on its badge.
You'll then have the best of both worlds. Commander 4.0 has all those wonderful file viewers, and since Commander is a "point-and-shoot" file manager, you can examine (but not edit) files with long filenames in version 4.0. After you figure out what you want to do, C
ommander 95 will do all the file transactions involved and preserve the long filenames and extended attributes.
Commander 95 even has a "transfer later files only" capability, although it doesn't work very well; that is, you can tell it to transfer later files only and include subdirectories, and it will do that, but every time it wants to write over a file, it asks you about it. If you ever check "Yes to all," it happily copies
all
the files, later or not. This is a bug that could cause a problem if you're trying to synchronize files, and I wish they'd get it fixed. On the other hand, if you do answer a file at a time, it skips all files that aren't later and never asks about them, which is what you wanted it to do.
I'm still not entirely fond of having to use the mouse to make choices you can make from the keyboard with DOS Commander, and there are some other annoying "features," but for me, the combination of Commander 4.0 for DOS and Commander 95 is still the best file management system a
vailable. That may be due to habit and your mileage may vary, but Commander 95 remains on the recommended list.
Do you need Microsoft Publisher if you have Word 7.0?
It turns out I don't, but you may.
A few weeks ago, Larry Niven and I decided to show a draft of
The Burning City
, our next novel, to our crack editor. That meant printing it on paper. Over the years, I have found that the right way to print a reading copy of a novel is to print two justified columns in landscape (sideways) mode on 8 1/2 by 11 paper. The result if done right is that it looks just like an opened book. It used to be that you could do that only by loading your Word file into PageMaker (or equivalent), but recent versions of Word have made it progressively easier to do, and with Word 7.0, it's quite painless.
There is a problem: you can have only one header, meaning only one page number, per page. What I'd like to have is a different header and page number at the top of each column of text. With
PageMaker, this is easy, but using PageMaker is considerable trouble, worth it for final copy -- one publisher, Jim Baen, actually does camera-ready copy layouts in-house with PageMaker -- but hardly worth that much effort for an editing draft. I can live with the one header per page that Word gives, but I kept hoping there was a simple program that would solve my problem. It would be even better if the program understood pagination well enough to let me print on both sides of the paper, meaning that it would print every other page each pass through the printer.
I thought Publisher might do that. Alas, it won't. Despite its name, Publisher isn't a program for publishing books. It is, however, a perfectly splendid little program if you're doing newsletters, flyers, bulletins, and even small booklets. It has wizards and templates, it knows how to integrate text and art, and it's pretty easy to use. It comes with a whole bunch of clip art, and the manual is a decent introduction to desktop publishing, comple
te with design suggestions and good, clear instructions. It probably ought to be named "Small Publisher," but Microsoft has a policy against multiword product names.
If you need to publish short and effective flyers, bulletins, etc., you can make do with Word 7.0, but if you're doing it on a regular basis, it's well worth it to get Publisher and learn it. Publisher didn't solve my problem, but it may well be what's needed for yours.
Avalon Hill was long the outstanding leader in board-type war games.
It may be they were too dominant, because many of their computer games looked like board games on-screen. That doesn't always work well.
In the early days of the computer revolution, I encouraged companies to use small computers as adjuncts to board games. For example, the computer could keep track of false units: you move one unit on the board, but it turns out that when the enemy attacks it, it's really a stack, and you can prove it because the computer knows what's in the stack. Th
e computer could also keep track of unit strengths, handle combat random numbers, and do much of the otherwise tedious bookkeeping that threatened to bog down board games.
No one tried combining board games and computers, although I've often wondered why. Instead, hexagon maps appeared on-screen. The problem was that well after the computer era was upon us, they continued to publish board games that way. While some of them were pretty good as simulations, they required so much scrolling around to give you a view of the whole battlefield that they weren't much fun.
I'm pleased to say that Avalon Hill has broken out of that mold. Their new game Cave Wars is a turn-based strategy game combining resource management and combat, but it's not just a board game on-screen. The playing area is truly 3-D, the graphics are neat, and there's not a sign of a hexagon map. If you like this kind of game, you'll like this one a lot.
Next, Over the Reich is as good a game based on World War II air operations in Euro
pe as I have seen. It's turn-based strategic, and you "fly" your squadron of fighters by giving orders; no arcade skills are required. You can play as American, British, or German. There are 22 kinds of aircraft. Each has strengths and weaknesses. So do the individual pilots under your command, and part of the skill you need is to know how to employ each pilot for maximum effectiveness. There's a good bit of the
Twelve O'Clock High
flavor to this game.
In the real world, I am no fan of U.S. strategic bombardment in the European theater of World War II. In hindsight, it's nontrivial but possible to prove that the resources devoted to heavy bomber operations would have been better employed in air operations more closely tied to ground combat, as well as in buying more tanks and artillery. However, this isn't to slight the courage and skill of those who conducted the air war in Europe. If you want some of the flavor of what World War II fighter operations were like, this is the game for you.
Fin
ally, Avalon Hill has a computer version of Wooden Ships & Iron Men. It's closer to a board game than the other two. Still, it's got some of the realism and flavor of the Horatio Hornblower era, and I enjoyed it.
Where to Find
Cave Wars......................................$69.95
Over the Reich.................................$69.95
Wooden Ships & Iron Men........................$69.95
Avalon Hill Game Co.
Baltimore, MD
Phone: 800-999-3222
Phone: 410-254-9200
Fax: 410-254-0991
E-mail:
ahgames@aol.com
Diskeeper 2.0 for Windows NT Workstation.......$75.00
Diskeeper 2.0 for Windows NT Server...........$399.00
Executive Software
Glendale, CA
Phone: 800-829-6468
Phone: 818-547-2050
Fax: 818-545-9241
Internet:
http://www.execsoft.com
WEB EXCLUSIVE: The Same Old Column
