Jerry doesn't usually consult the stars, but he discovers that some among the star-struck have been consulting his data line, without permission. He also has a few suggestions for Microsoft. For those, read "Doing Something About Microsoft" in the April issue of BYTE.
Jerry Pournelle
The latest reports from the legal front indicate that a consortium of companies headed by Ralph Nader is trying to put a hamper on the release of Windows 98 by insisting that Internet Explorer 4 be unbundled from the product through court orders. From what I've seen,
that will be very difficult and certainly will delay the introduction of Memphis/Windows 98. This would be a blooming shame, because Memphis adds a lot of capability to Windows 95.
We like it, and we think you will; and why a "consumer advocate" who is widely reported not to use computers should stop you from enjoying new features in your OS is a bit beyond me. Doubtless there's a good reason, but in all the flurries of press releases, I haven't fo
und one that appeals to me. If Microsoft needs dealing with as a monopoly, do that; but don't beat up on the rest of us in the bargain.
Pournelle's law: companies that resort to government action to help them increase sales over their opposition generally have problems competing in other ways. Resources devoted to lawyers and lobbyists are not being used to improve their products.
Chaos Manor assistant Eric Pobirs reports continued success with Memphis, now officially known as Windows 98. He also notes that Internet E
xplorer 4 and ActiveX are very much integrated into the OS. As an example, the spelling dictionaries in your "common" area for Microsoft Office applications are used to do on-line spelling checking of mail and other compositions you do in Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 4 runs Java very well; standard Sun-compliant Java applications run faster in Internet Explorer 4 than in Netscape Communicator.
Eric is testing Windows 98 on RacingCow, a Gateway 2000 P-133 with some hot game video and sound equipment. Prior to that he'd been a Communicator user; but it seemed reasonable to use Internet Explorer 4 with Memphis. He's now pretty well a convert. On the advice of Eric and my son Alex, I started my serious Internet work in Navigator 1. Being a creature of great inertia, I have stayed with it through all its upgrades to Communicator 4. However, I have to confess I like Eric's reports on just how nifty Internet Explorer has become.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. As I reported here some time ago, Mi
crosoft has put some of their brightest young people to work on Internet Explorer, and since the product is not a profit center, their stock options are based on the overall profitability of Microsoft. This gives them a powerful incentive to work hard, not that people that bright aren't generally compulsive about doing their best work anyway.
Netscape started as a small outfit of bright people with a two-year head start over Microsoft. Unfortunately, somewhere in there, they began believing their own press releases, or at least the industry buzz that they could do no wrong. They didn't stop running, but they didn't race as hard as they could; and you just can't
do
that if your competitor is Microsoft.
Whatever you do, look at your phone bills.
I have had an ISDN line for about two years now. When I installed it, the Pacific Bell official I talked to about it was Scott Adams, before he left the company to do "Dilbert" full time. In all that time, the line has been connected to a mod
em. I understand it is possible to have voice conversations on an ISDN line, but not on mine because there's no telephone instrument attached.
The bill is the same amount every month. About a year ago, it went up $10 a month; but I was busy and paid no attention. Last week, I looked at the back pages of the bill.
A billing-service company has been charging me $11.25, representing $9.95 a month on behalf of another company whose name meant nothing to me, plus taxes. The only explanation of this charge is the line item "Monthly Fee."
I called Pacific Bell. They weren't able to explain this: the billing company claims I owe them the money, so they bill me for it. "How dare you charge me without asking if I consented to this?," I demanded. I got some spiel about the Public Utility Commission requiring them to collect. Apparently, if anyone, anyone at all, tells the telephone company that you owe them money, the phone company will cheerfully bill you for it and pass the money along to the claimant, who
may or may not be in cahoots with the phone company. If you don't see the potential for fraud in this, I certainly do.
I would, Pacific Bell told me, have to call the billing company. Examination of the phone bill revealed there was an 800 number. I called, and after about 20 rings, the line was answered by a young woman. We went through some rigmarole about identification. Apparently, I was supposed to call on the line that incurred the bill.
"I can't," I said. "It's an ISDN data line. There is never any voice traffic on that line."
Long pause. "Well, we're only a collection agency. The bill is on behalf of ..."
"I know. Who are they?"
"They're a Florida astrology club."
"An astrology club." I thought about that one. "Here I am, an earned Ph.D., a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science -- what in the world would I have to do with a Florida astrology club?"
"They provide your answering service."
"Answering service. On a data line on which there is ne
ver any voice traffic. Clearly, I never authorized this. You've been doing this for 14 months, so it's in excess of $100. You're in Texas, this astrology club is in Florida, and I'm in California. Clearly across state lines. My one question now is whether my next call is to the Secret Service or the FBI?"
"We'll cancel the service."
"Not good enough."
"We'll refund all your money."
At which point I let her off the hook; but I shouldn't have, since they have had the use of my money for a year for providing "services" they could not possibly have provided. Besides, so quickly agreeing to refund every dime they'd collected from me without bothering to ask their client if they had any evidence that I had agreed to let them do it made me wonder if she didn't know something was fishy. I'm still stewing about this. Of course, if I'd wanted to spend my life in courtrooms, I'd have been a lawyer, and a hundred and forty bucks isn't all that much money; but the more I think about this, the angrier I get
.
It's also disturbing to think how widespread this probably is. Here we have a situation in which one company claims to be collecting on behalf of another, submits its bill to my telephone company, and the telephone company doesn't question what "service" is provided or whether I agreed to it, or even if it is possible for that service to be provided. It just sends me the bill with the implied threat that if I don't pay it they will cut off my phones. Grrr.
There is something very rotten about this system.
Meanwhile, study your phone bill. I have five phone lines, and it turns out that I had mysterious charges on three of them. I've only told you about the most blatant. Let's see, assume 200 million telephone lines, assume two out of 10 have a spurious charge -- three out of five of mine did -- and assume the average scam gets not the $10 they got from me, but only $1, not enough for most people to notice. That is $40 million a month being bilked from the American people, passing through the phon
e companies, who are probably collecting a service fee and possibly investing the float, to "billing services" anywhere in the country, which allegedly pass that money along to outfits like this astrology club in Florida. This is no small sum.
Look at your phone bills.
I had occasion to look up a Bible quotation the other day
, so I fired up my Logos Bible Reference Series software from Logos Research Systems (
http://www.logos.com/
); and I have to say, I had forgotten just how astonishingly good it is. It's also complete. My edition has no fewer than seven Bible versions, from the King James to more modern translations; plus original Hebrew and Greek sources.
The search engines are excellent, and the whole product is intuitively useful. I wasn't sure of any part of the quotation I was looking f
or, and I had misplaced the manual for the program. No matter. I found the CD-ROM, installed it, and in less than a minute I had my quotation, which in fact differed substantially from Bible version to Bible version. I gave a copy of this software to St. Mary's College of Theology a couple of years ago, and I understand they have nearly worn out the disc. I can see why.
If you have any serious interest in Bible study, or if you just want to have fun looking up obscure quotations and references, you'll want Logos Bible software. The version I have is 2.0, but I've had it a while and it's since been updated. Recommended.
While we're on reference software, there are several very good encyclopedias on CD-ROM. Two of them are just plain excellent: the Britannica and Microsoft's Encarta. Of the two, Encarta wins hands down on ease of use and a generally pleasant user interface. Britannica is fussier. They're more paranoid about your stealing their crown jewels, and the interface isn't as intuitive. Also,
until recently, the Britannica was overpriced. For all that, the content is unsurpassed.
My favorite encyclopedia remains the 1911 edition of Britannica. It's not so good on things modern, but it was very complete. I'm not sure why there was a copy of the 1911 edition around the farmhouse where I grew up; but I sure enjoyed reading it. That, alas, doesn't appear to be available on-line or on CD. Yet.
I continue to be astonished at how inexpensive graphics software and hardware
that offer capabilities that only a year ago would have been considered high-end, and found only in professional studios, have become. But before you plunge in, take note: it's still very much a brave new world. David Em, our graphics associate, has more on that. Here's his report.
"Our biggest achievement this month has been to put up 32 running feet of shelves in the Graphics Lab to support the library of imaging software we've been inundated with this year. Between the never-ending barrage of new releases and upd
ates for what we've already got, we could easily spend the rest of our lives doing nothing but installing and maintaining interesting new graphics applications. Never mind learning how to use or do something productive with them.
"There is so much going on in graphics and multimedia, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. But information overload often equals pattern recognition, and one thing that's becoming clear to me is that the much-vaunted convergence we read about in the popular press is not only about the merging of digital medium types, it's about the merging of high and low.
"By this I mean that the stratospheric high end of computing and the cheapo low end are merging in ways that will fundamentally affect how all digital media will be produced and distributed -- effective immediately.
"Take broadcast TV, for example. The machines that live in the production bays where news shows are created or commercials are edited typically cost hundreds of thousand of dollars. A product that fit
s into this framework is Microsoft's new Softimage Digital Studio. Digital Studio is a professional-quality unified Windows NT audio and video editing and effects powerhouse that will sell for $100,000 bundled with specialized hardware from Intergraph.
"Alex and I experienced the three-video-screen-and-flashing-lights Digital Studio world tour rollout at the American Film Institute and left duly impressed that the Softimage team has crafted a heck of a video postproduction tool.
"The next week, we got a visit from Steve Roberts of eyeon Software (
http://www.eyeonline.com/
), who demonstrated the newly released Digital Fusion 2.0. Digital Fusion is an NT video-compositing program that offers tremendous control over resolution-independent layers of video. It works on both Pentium and Alpha platforms. (Steve's
eyes lit up when he saw our Carrera Alpha 500.)
"Digital Fusion looks like a winner (we'll be taking a closer look at it next month). In combination with a series of filter effects from 5D (
http://www.5-d.com/
), Digital Fusion becomes about 90 percent as capable as programs such as Discreet Logic's Flint and Flame, which run exclusively on Silicon Graphics machines and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for an installation. (I understand that these prices are on the way down, too. Competition surges on.)
"About the same time, Alex visited Play (
http://www.play.com/
), which is finally about to release its much-anticipa
ted Trinity real-time digital video hardware/software production tool that processes multiple inputs and outputs, does snazzy effects, makes titles, etc., all for a base price of about $5000.
"Maybe products such as Digital Fusion and Trinity don't do every single thing that monsters such as Digital Studio can, but they're getting awfully close on both the hardware and software fronts, and at a fraction of the cost. Big players who don't watch what's going on in the so-called lower end of the digital video universe may soon find themselves in the same position Silicon Graphics is in today.
"This perception was further confirmed at Comdex. November Comdex is not a show professional video people go to; they go to NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters trade show) in April in the same Las Vegas location. Yet companies such as Sony were showing digital video cameras at a few thousand dollars a pop that record a digital video signal superior to the Beta SP cameras of not too long ago that cost tens
of thousands of dollars.
"Pinnacle Systems (
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/
), the company that absorbed the miro Digital Video Group recently, showed its miroVideo DV300 card that inputs digital video data onto your hard disk using its own dedicated SCSI controller; it can also control your digital video camera or deck, all for a list price of $799. As I talked to vendors about their products, the conversations about image quality, frame rates, time codes, and the like sounded more like floor talk at NAB, not Comdex.
"Most of the products showcased at Comdex are targeted at consumers and mass distributors. If there were any producers of professional broadcast equipment cruising the aisles, I didn't see them. Over the next 18 months or so, expect to see video production tools that are presently found only in
big broadcast studios available to anyone willing to make a modest investment.
"This newest video revolution (there have been several, from the introduction of color, to VCRs, to camcorders) won't necessarily make producing video easy. If you've read our last few graphics reports, you know we're in our third month of getting our video to run properly and reliably, and clearly we still have a way to go.
"At this point, the safest bet is still to buy a dedicated, preconfigured system to be used exclusively for video. Digital video capture and editing put serious demands on even the fastest computers, the disk requirements can be very specific and are steep enough to induce vertigo, and many applications don't play well together.
"An example of this is the Avid (
http://www.avid.com/
) MCXpress for Windows NT ed
iting software that came bundled with our Intergraph TD 200 editing system, which includes TrueVision's Targa 2000 RTX video board as part of the package. MCXpress is engineered to work with the RTX board, which has a number of real-time capabilities. (I won't go into the gruesome details of what it's taken to get it running, but it finally does, with the exception of some audio irregularities we're ruthlessly hunting to the ground.)
"Once we got the hardware more or less beaten into submission, I set myself to learning MCXpress. My impression (I haven't edited a whole lot with it yet, just monkeyed around) is that it's a very capable editing suite. It doesn't have every bell and whistle that some of Avid's pricier editing products offer, but you could cut about any corporate video, documentary film, or TV program with it very satisfactorily. So far, I like it a lot.
"I decided to compare MCXpress's performance with Adobe Premiere's on the same system. Premiere recognized the Targa 2000 and could capt
ure stills, but not moving video. When Alex and I attempted to capture video with it, Premiere went haywire, blitting and flashing open windows all over the screen.
"Next, we discovered that the MCXpress sound driver seems to have become locked to the RTX's mixer, with the result that it's incapacitated any audio mixing but its own. Thus, we now have no audio-level control not only for Premiere, but anywhere else in the OS either. Various concerned parties are attempting to solve our woes, but so far, bupkis.
"If you're serious about incorporating digital video into your life, first ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish and whether you need all this gadgetry. Video signals are inherently weird, and when it comes to orders of complexity in your setup, less is definitely more. For some applications, you don't even have to crack your computer's case.
"I ran into a friend at a party the other day who represents female sports figures in endorsements. After messing with a powerful Media 100 edit
ing system and realizing she was in over her head, she bought a Hi-8 camera and a cheap tape-editing console at a brand-name consumer-electronics chain. Now she shoots tape of her clients, cuts the tape in her home office, and has the results burned on to a CD for distribution to prospective advertisers. (I suggested she press her own CDs, now that CD-Recordables such as our Smart and Friendly CD-R finally work.)
"Another example of doing more with less is my friend, filmmaker David Lebrun. David's been using Macromedia Director on a Power Mac 9500 to previsualize scenes for a film he's working on. He's been looking for an inexpensive way to lay computer output to tape so he can show other people working on the film what he's up to. I lent him our Averkey3 Plus, a stand-alone box ($249 street price) that converts VGA signals to video. Here's what he had to say:
""My first test was not encouraging. I got an excellent image out of the Averkey to a video monitor, but when I sent the signal to a good co
nsumer VHS recorder, I got occasional horizontal bands and rainbow artifacts floating vertically through the image.
"As a second test, I brought the Averkey output, via RCA jack, into a Beta SP industrial edit bay. To my surprise, I got a good stable image. At first I thought the explanation was that I was passing the signal through one of the time base correctors (and thereby stabilizing the image.
"But then I tried patching directly to the record VTR and experienced no loss of stability; the image was in fact improved because I was bypassing the time base corrector. Color rendition was good, and the image looked decent and stable on a waveform monitor and vectorscope. For an artist who needs to lay a sample of computer artwork to videotape, for example, the image I got going into the Beta SP bay would certainly do the job.
"The Averkey3 Plus was intended for monitor presentations, not for video transfer; its literature makes no claims for it having video-transfer capability. But for a couple hun
dred dollars, the Averkey3 Plus may provide an acceptable alternative to an expensive video card. However, I would definitely recommend testing the unit with the video system you plan to use it with.""
"David Lebrun also reports, by the way, that editing documentaries can require having around 200 hours of tape or film available at your fingertips. Let's see, at 2 GB for every 9 minutes of digital video, that means...
"Fortunately, several competitively priced fast drives featuring 10 to 25 GB of storage were previewed at Comdex; we'll shortly be taking a closer look at ways to array groups of these.
"The other big hardware news at Comdex in my book was the rapid evolution of large-format flat-panel displays. I looked at upcoming offerings from Sharp, Nanao/Eizo, Xerox, Philips, and a host of others. The best flat-panel display I saw was NEC's (
http://www.nec.com/
) superbright, 24-bit, 21-inch Multisync LCD2000, which featured 1280 by 1024 pixels resolution (1600 by 1200 is coming) and a full 160 degrees of viewability, top-to-bottom, left-to-right. For anything but the most critical color requirements, this is one of the best computer displays I've ever seen. At $8,000 per unit, it may not be replacing many big tubes this week, but I predict prices will drop steeply as production becomes more reliable and demand increases.
"The other flat-panel display that made a big impression on me was ViewSonic's 15-inch 1024- by 768-pixel resolution VPA150 ViewPanel. The panel is very bright, it can be rotated from a horizontal to a vertical position, and its viewable screen size compares favorably with some 17-inch monitors. At $2195, it begins to fit into many more budgets; prices for this size panel are already dropping significantly.
"I saw two interesting software packages at Comdex. The first was AnimaTek's
(
http://www.animatek.com/
) World Builder, Yosemite Edition, which creates startlingly real 3-D landscapes complete with weather, seasons, and rainbows. The other was Corel's (
http://www.corel.com/
) CorelDraw 8, the first Corel imaging package that's grabbed and held my attention in a long time.
"I've scraped out a few hours over the last week to play with both these packages and will be reporting on both of them in some depth shortly, assuming I can get around to using all this neat new software -- instead of spending all my time getting it running."
David Em Gallery:
http://www.businesstech.com/art/emgallery.html
There has been a seemingly never-ending stream of excellent games in the past few weeks;
enough that I ought to write a special games review. Unfortunately, my deadlines are piling up lately and I can't make any promises; but if I do get to it, you'll be able to find it at http:/home.earthlink.net/~jerryp.
Two of the best new games are World War II simulators: Panzer General II and Steel Panthers III, both from Strategic Simulations (
http://www.ssionline.com
). Of the two, Panzer General II is the most changed from its parent game, with an entirely new engine and what some reviewers ha
ve justly called stunning graphics. Steel Panthers III, on the other hand, is much like its two predecessors, but now instead of commanding a battalion, you get a brigade. The result is a bit less personal -- there are so many units to control that you don't get as attached to any one of them as you do in the battalion-level game -- but then that's realistic, too. These are both turn-based, which is fine by me; I have become pretty weary of "real-time" games that seek to supplement the rather weak AI system by making the outcome dependent on who can click a mouse fast enough.
Meanwhile, Eric has been continuing his experiments with video hardware and other things of interest to gamers.
"First the bad news. The Creative Labs digital versatile disc (DVD) kit
has either been in some previous reviewer's hands or was mishandled by Creative's own people. When we got it, the drive was almost completely dead. The only time the drive door would open under its own power was when the system was displayin
g the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" message. Beats me. Before making that discovery, I forced the drive open by the paper-clip method. In the tray was a
Short Cinema Journal #1
disc that was severely scratched. No empty case for this disc was among the packaging. Oddly enough, there were two movie discs still in the shrink-wrap.
"I was surprised to find that the decoder relies on an external video loop similar to the 3Dfx Voodoo boards. I suspect this helps explain their claimed superior video scaling by avoiding both the PCI bus and the lack of proper support from millions of video cards in the installed market.
"In any case, the product we received could not be reviewed. Creative Labs has since sent a replacement. It does not include any movie discs, so it remains a mystery where the two included in the previous package originated. If they were supplied by the person who killed the drive, all is forgiven.
"In the meantime, I installed the Hi-Val (
http://www.hival.com/
) DVD package with RacingCow's (the system I conduct most of my experiments on these days) original CD-ROM drive as a secondary drive. This was necessary because the first-generation Toshiba DVD drive cannot read CD-R or CD-RW discs. Handling these formats is a capability that is becoming vital to many users. Anybody tempted by a bargain price on an early DVD kit should keep this in mind.
"Applying the Hi-Val DVD kit has been a series of misadventures with a highly rewarding conclusion. The first time out, RacingCow had a Matrox Millennium video board and the Diamond Monster Sound card. The shovelware (previously published games that originally occupied several CD-ROMs, now presented on a single DVD) discs that didn't use MPEG-2 video worked fine. The only difference between them and their earlier editions was the mediu
m they were being read from. When it came to movies, the visual display was appalling. Lowering the resolution in Windows made for only a slight improvement. The audio, thanks to the Monster Sound card's ability to support two sets of stereo speakers, was terrific, kind of a local-area surround-sound system.
"Getting a watchable display with the Matrox Millennium proved hopeless. The Wavecom wireless RF transmitter set that Hi-Val offers in the high-end model of the kit also was of little use. Chaos Manor is just too noisy in that portion of the spectrum, or perhaps there's some other evil condition.
"I'd nearly given up hope of experiencing DVD-ROM when I tried the ATI All-In-Wonder board (see "Virtual Publishing-and Virtual Travel" in the October 1997 BYTE for more on that board). Displaying DVD video across the PCI bus was only a slight improvement over the Matrox Millennium. I then tried running the external output from the Cinemaster (Hi-Val uses Quadrant International's Cinemaster decoder board)
to the external input of the All-In-Wonder. Fire up ATI's viewer/capture software and shazam! Beautiful full-screen video.
"The real surprise came when I switched from the ATI software to the Cinemaster player program. The display was also flawless. Somehow, the All-In-Wonder's features were active for all comers while its own player was operating. The next big challenge is to make it work under an overly helpful Windows 98.
"Unfortunately, the Diamond Monster Sound card has lately fallen into disuse. Not only does it not currently work with Windows 98, it has a major deficiency under all OSes. The joystick port will not work with many of the digital controllers that are rapidly taking over the PC gaming market. Diamond has resolved the issue for several of the leading products, but this is a black mark on an otherwise excellent and pioneering effort. Over time, this will cease to be a concern as the universal serial bus (USB) becomes the preferred connector for human input devices, but for now,
this severely compromises the card's utility for gamers.
"Moving on to the good news, Creative Labs
(
http://creativelabs.com/
) has a new Graphics Blaster Exxtreme Professional Edition video card based on 3D Lab's Permedia2 chip that packs 8 MB of synchronous graphics RAM (SGRAM) for only $199. An interesting facet is the ability to add the same decoder featured in its DVD kit. Mounting it on the card should avoid the external cable kludge, but it will require mounting a panel since the card itself has no external ports except VGA out. Since it saves a valuable PCI slot, the loss of an ISA slot to the panel is a worthwhile trade-off.
"Putting the decoder on the video card is a natural progression. It saves a slot as well as the cost of the 16 Mb of RAM needed for the MPEG-2 frame buffer. This has happ
ened before with MPEG-1, which is now a standard feature on almost every video card sold today. It's largely ignored in consumer software, since there is so little compelling content.
"DVD, on the other hand, has high consumer awareness and undeniable quality. As John Dvorak noted in a recent
Inside Track
column, DVD drives will become increasingly common as a replacement for CD-ROM, but manufacturers will try to cheap out by not including a proper decoder, ala the Compaq Presario 4840 and 4850, which are otherwise nice consumer-oriented Pentium II systems. Intel and its partners are claiming that a Pentium II can do the job, but this remains to be demonstrated on a shipping platform. Performance on the 300-MHz Presario 4850 suffers noticeable glitches on challenging scenes (the kind they avoid in the store demonstration) and runs in low resolution.
"By the time acceptable software decoding is brought to market, the cost of hardware decoding will have fallen within the range of $200 video car
ds. The advantage, especially for gaming, lies in not tying up the CPU. Using MPEG-2 to create animated textures in a 3-D environment isn't going to be a software-only possibility until 1-GHz IA-64s are in the consumer market. With a $50 decoder, it can be done today.
"In the near term, upgradable video cards represent a win for both PC manufacturers and users who may not be sold on high-quality video at the time of purchase. As the decoder becomes completely subsumed within the video processor (in about three years, by my guess), it will become a freebie, appearing in sub-$1000 systems. The success of DVD video relies at least partially on how fast the industry can make it a standard feature.
"The last item on my list is a very ambitious single-slot solution from Video Logic, with the imposing title of Apocalypse 5D Sonic. It manages to contain the highest rated 2-D accelerator from Tseng Labs, NEC's Power VR2 for high-end 3-D, and a 64-channel 3-D audio system from Ensoniq. It isn't clear yet whethe
r a joystick port or NTSC video output is included. The suggested retail price for an 8-MB unit is $315, a competitive price. If DVD decoding can be added, this would make a terrific OEM mini-tower item -- a fully configured compact system that still allows ample expansion. I definitely want to get a look at this one."
Things My Postman Brings Me:
Another peek into the Chaos Manor mailbag.
Jerry,
I read your December 1997 column describing your Windows 95 installation problems. Like you, I've learned that copying the CAB files to the hard drive is the most expedient and trouble-free way to go. However, if one forgets, as you did the second time around, there is a relatively painless way to take care of it.
After a successful installation from CD or a network server, copy the CAB files to the hard drive. For brevity, I create a C:\95 directory. Following that, you have to run REGEDIT and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft
\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup
Look for the SourcePath Value and double-click on it. In the Value data: area, enter the new path to the CAB files. Click on OK and close REGEDIT. Next time the machine wants the Windows 95 files, it will look in the new location.
Jeff Karasik
Technical Services, Frontier Insurance Group
JKARASIK@frontierins.com
I knew there was a way to do that, but I was a bit lazy. Thanks for telling us how.
I had the same installation problems you had in installing your Ethernet card (Fire Three for Effect!, December 1997 BYTE) with a 3Com card (3C905-TX) on one of my PCs. I was installing from drivers I downloaded onto my home PC from 3Com's Web site. I ended up reinstalling five to 10 times and even had to reinstall Windows 95 twice. I ended up printing the tree of files from the directories the drivers expanded into but still had troubles. There is a point at which fecklessness becomes an art.
The problem is broa
der than the one we experienced. Windows 95 can't remember anything. I think the deal Microsoft is trying to make is that the OS will handle everything and we don't have to worry. With DOS, Unix, or OS/2, you could always override things that went haywire or fool the OS if you had to. With Windows 95, you have no recourse except to reinstall.
It was very amusing reading that your troubles were the same as mine.
Bob Molyneux
bob@molyneux.com
There ought to be ways to nail things up, but I sure don't know how they work. I've had even worse problems with NT when Plug and Play doesn't work right, though. Then I remember what it was like back in CP/M days, when it took minutes to reboot and 40 seconds to save a text file on 8-inch floppy disks, and I giggle a bit.
I just finished reading your January Chaos Manor and thought I would point out a potential problem to you. When you were talking about finding SB16 drivers in E:\DRVLIB\AUDIO\SBPNP\PPC\,
I almost had a heart attack. I work for Creative Labs in the Advanced Technical Support department. One of the bigger problems we encounter with NT is when customers install drivers from one of the PPC directories, which are for PowerPC computers that use Motorola's PowerPC chip. Usually when someone installs a driver from a PPC directory (the biggest problem is when they install the ISAPNP driver for PowerPC systems), the only way to make NT function properly is to reinstall it. The correct directory to pull drivers from is the I386 directory (X386 in some places). That stands for "Intel 386 architecture."
I just thought you might like to know so you might be able to prevent a problem in the future.
Oh, and shame on you for installing a Sound Blaster "compatible" card in Phillip's machine. A true gamer would want a true Sound Blaster card. I would have thought better of you.
Scott M. Taylor
ATS Shift Lead
Creative Labs, Inc.
You're right, of
course: I found the right drivers, but I didn't fix it in the article. While I've been an admirer of Creative Labs' work since the days of Brown and Waugh, and I was one of the first writers to prefer Creative over AdLib (remember them?), I have to say that Diamond has done a good job with their boards, too. Good enough is good enough, after all. What I really need is a good PCI Sound Blaster.
Thanks for your excellent article concerning chip cooling in the January BYTE. The white goo you mentioned works great in my experience, too. It can also be purchased from Radio Shack (a small tube with enough for two CPUs for about $2, a good investment). It is called Heatsink Compound, by Archer, Cat. #276-1372, and is a silicone-based compound.
Best Regards,
Courtney Brown
csbrown@ibm.net
Thanks. I knew there had to be a source other than PC Power & Cooling, but since I get all my cooling stuff from them, I hadn't known the details.
Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer and BYTE's senior contributing editor. You can write to Jerry c/o BYTE, 29 Hartwell Ave., Lexington, MA 02173. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope and 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
. Visit Chaos Manor at http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp/
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