Storage is at the top of the agenda this month: Jerry expands Chaos Manor's fabled multiple redundancy backup system. You can read all about it in "Four Ways to More Storage" in the May issue of BYTE. Meanwhile, Jerry muses on memory, and Copy Disk goes AWOL.
Jerry Pournelle
We recently used an Evergreen 586 Upgrade for 486 Desktops
(
http://www.evertech.com/
) on Old Cow, the Gateway 2000 486 DX2 50 that sits upstairs in my "monk's cell" where I go hide to write fiction. It took about 9 minutes, and that includes opening the case twice -- I had managed to loosen the SCSI ribbon cable to the CD-ROM while inserting the upgrade chip. Improvements are obvious but not startling: it took 30 seconds to shut down before, now it takes 20. Copy times to and from the parallel port Zip drive are shorter, also by about the same ratio. If you use an old 486 primarily for writing, it may not be worth it; but if it's a major part of your system, adding the Evergreen upgrade chip will turn it into a Pentium equivalent, and adds a high-speed floating point unit, which makes a dramatic improvement in anything that needs a lot of calculations; and that is very much worth the modest -- about $100 -- expense. As Chaos Manor intern Eric Pobirs puts it, you won't particularly notice it, but you'll get some of your life back.
I wanted to add more memory to Old Cow, but that machine uses 30 pin SIMS, and those need to be installed in blocks of 4. So far I have 4 chips of 4 megabytes, and another 4 of 1 megabyte each, for a total of 20. I haven't found any 30 pin SIMS of more than 4 megabytes, so I suspect the system
will top out at 32 once I find 4 more 4-meg 30-pin SIMS. I'm in no hurry: Old Cow is plenty good enough for writing, and that's all it's used for.
Memory is cheap, and there's no excuse for not having enough.
Most Microsoft problems go away if you're not short of memory. By enough, I mean at least 32 MB, and it does no harm to have 64. You get less disk activity (the system isn't swapping memory to disk) and everything is generally faster, and unless you're running weird experimental software, crashes are very rare. More memory is good.
But beware of bad memory.
The problem isn't memory that doesn't work at all, it's when the memory seems to work but there are e
rrors. Not only can that bring your system down, but memory errors can corrupt both the system registry and the automatic backup copy of that registry; and if that happens you may not be able to bring your system up at all. This may be rare, but it just happened to a system my son Alex maintains. Alas, memory can pass the startup memory test and still fail in use.
The good news is that memory errors tend to be cases of infant mortality. If you haven't had a problem in a week of normal use after installing new memory, you probably won't have one at all.
There are two ways to protect yourself. First, it may be worth while to pay the extra 10% or so to buy name brand memory, such as Kingston. One of the things you are paying for when you buy name brand memory is extra testing, so that infant mortalities don't happen. The peace of mind may be worth the price. We tend to use Kingston Technology (
http://www.kingston.com/
) memory here because while I can get column material out of problems, I don't go seeking them.
The other way is even more important: back up your Windows directory, particularly the System subdirectory, and certainly the registry files, before you install new memory. Actually, it's a good idea routinely to back up that directory. When you do, don't forget that the critical files are hidden system files, and won't be copied unless you've taken steps to be sure they will be. The simplest way to do that is to go to My Computer, View, Options, View (again), and set it to show all files and hide none. Now when you copy that directory you'll copy all the files. Copy the Windows directory off to a directory you never write to, then install your memory. After that, at worst you'll be able to boot with a DOS disk and manually copy those saved files back where they belong. Better, though, is periodically to
burn a CR-R of your entire Windows directory, and make sure you have an emergency DOS disk that can see your CD-ROM drive.
A couple more points are worth mentioning here. First, the sweet spot in Microsoft Windows 95 is 32 MB. Below that you can have problems. Going up from 32 will help; at about 48 MB you'll stop noticing improvements, but memory often comes in 32-MB chunks now, and there is a slight performance improvement between 48 and 64 MB. For a number of reasons including cache limits in Intel chips, when you get above 64 MB it depends entirely on the application. Many programs go to the swap file if they need more than 64 MB, and there's not a lot you can do about that.
Photoshop, and some other big and well designed graphics programs, do see and use memory well beyond 64 MB. If you work with big graphics images, your life will get better the more memory you have, so don't let me discourage you from adding more. Of course, if you routinely need to deal with really large images on the PC, yo
u should probably look into Windows NT.
As always, before you add memory, back up all your system and registry files. Norton System Doctor will do that for you (it's the 'rescue' utility) or you can do it by hand; the easiest way to do that is to copy the entire Windows/System subdirectory to some other drive on the same machine. When you do, be sure that you're copying all the hidden system files. If you don't backup and you get bad memory, you will really regret it.
When my ancient Hewlett-Packard LaserJet III printer died
-- actually, the printer was fine but the little rubber wheels that feed the paper had deteriorated -- I got an HP LaserJet 4000 TN with built-in Ethernet card. Setting it up as the network printer looked easy. Then I paid the bills.
I wrote my accounting program in CBASIC back in CP/M days. It's not fancy, but it lets me enter a chart of accounts, accepts my entries, and outputs journals and ledgers that look like the ones you see in Accounting 101 courses. It also wri
tes my checks. My original check writer used the Diablo daisy-wheel printer and wrote them on a big roll of checks printed on a continuous form, but when Security Pacific bank was absorbed by Bank of America, I couldn't use those any more, so I wrote a new program that let the HP LaserJet III print checks on the sheets of three checks that fit in a 3-ring binder. That was over a dozen years ago. When I installed the HP 4000 printer I hoped I could still use that program, but when I tried it, it didn't work. This was late at night, and since the bills were due I wrote some 37 checks by hand. I didn't want to do that again. And yes, I know about electronic banking; I prefer paper trails.
Next day I called my friend Don Wadley at HP research in Boise. He didn't know, but just then Kevin Homan, who maintains the HP lab printers, came into Don's office, and he knew exactly what to do. When I installed the HP LaserJet 4000 I used the newest drivers, version 6. These understand a whole bunch of new formatting co
mmands. Unfortunately, they don't always do well with legacy jobs. The solution was to leave the network printer with level 6 drivers intact as Jedi6, and install another under a different name using the 5e drivers from the 4000's installation disk. It took me about three minutes to do this, and when I sent over the print file that had failed the night before, it printed perfectly.
Now most files print to Jedi6, but when I want to print from really old programs I choose Jedi5e as the default printer. Works like a charm, and my love affair with that HP 4000 continues unabated.
My "Copy Disk" command is missing.
Cyrus, the Cyrix 6x86-P166, runs Windows 95, and tends to be the machine I write these columns on. I'm not adventurous enough to install new and untried software on my main writing system, but everything else -- Internet communications, Web design, network control, calculations, general computing -- is done on Princess, the Compaq dual Pentium Pro NT Workstation, and since I have a gr
eat Ortek keyboard on Princess, I can write there also; meaning that I can afford to use Cyrus as an experimental machine for Win 95 stuff.
The other day I wanted to copy a floppy. Open My Computer; right click the A: drive to pull down the 'Files' menu; and look for the Copy Disk command.
There was no Copy Disk command. Instead there were a couple of commands put there by Micro Logic's Disk Mapper II, and another put there by Mijenix's ZIP Magic and Free Space; but no sign of a Copy Disk command. I have no idea how long that situation has prevailed, because I don't copy floppies very much. Now it was no great handicap to make the floppy copy with Princess, which does have a Copy Disk command, but it did set me to wondering.
I began to ask around. Naturally Mijenix said it must have been Micro Logic, and they said the opposite. The Mijenix programs were the most recent installations, but then they were installed on top of WinZip which itself adds things to that File pulldown menu in My Computer; a
nd since I have no idea at all when this all happened, I can't possibly say which of those programs did it, or even that it was one of them.
Then I went searching my books to find ways to restore that command. I learned a lot about registry hooks, but I never did manage that; this turns out to be major arcana. Clearly it can be done since many programs insert commands on that menu, but it's surprising how few programmers know how it's done. So far the best advice I have is to save off everything and reinstall Win 95; which will, of course, clean up a lot of garbage from my system -- I've been using Cyrus as the test machine for new software ever since I got Princess, and that means a LOT of stuff has been installed and then eliminated -- so it might be worth it, but it does seem drastic.
Suggestions welcomed. If you send big attachments, send to jerryp@earthlink.net. My main email address, jerryp@bix.com, is very handy but really accommodates text mail far better than attachments.
Anyone seen my
Copy Disk command? It was here only a couple of months ago...
A few upgrades, and other odds and ends:
Office 97 Service Release 1 fixes all those problems with importing older Word and Excel files, as well as some more obscure difficulties. If you don't have it, get it. It also fixes some problems with the grammar checker. I recommend grammar check programs for beginning writers, but they're useful as a quick final check for professionals too: a grammar checker will catch some spelling errors that a spell checker won't, such as using the wrong form of 'to'. Of course it won't get them all. It also warns you about very long sentences.
Mac OS 8.1 is a definite improvement over Mac OS 8, and Mac OS 8 is a landmark improvement in itself. If you use a Mac and you haven't upgraded to Mac OS 8, do so now; and if you're using 8.0, take the trouble to download 8.1. It's 16 MB and worth every second it takes to get it.
If you have an Olympus digital camera -- I have two and I love them -- you will w
ant to get to the Olympus site (
http://www.olympus.com/
) and download their new TWAIN driver, which is a vast improvement over the ones that came with your camera. Olympus software is now pretty well up to the Aunt Minnie standard. Fair warning, the Olympus Web site is market-oriented, and finding their download area requires patience and hard work. Once you do find it, what you need to do is obvious enough, and the new driver is well worth the effort it takes to find and download it.
And a belated Chaos Manor orchid to Adobe (
http://www.adobe.com/
) for their great Photoshop Web site. It makes it easy to get the 4.0.1 Phot
oshop patches, and they're noticeably worth the effort.
If you're just getting started with Photoshop, Hayden Books' Photoshop 4 Complete by Kate Binder, Ted Alspach and others, ISBN 1-56830-323-8 with a CD-ROM of images and utilities, is both a good start and a good reference work. The directions are explicit, the discussions don't assume you know a lot but get well into the professional level, and it's well written. Mac users will like Peachpit's Photoshop 4 Wow! Book, by Linnea Dayton and Jack Davis, ISBN 0-201-68856-5 with accompanying CD-ROM. It's nowhere near as complete as the Hayden book, but there's a higher Wow! factor.
While we're on the subject of belated orchids, I'm giving a belated virtual onion to Microsoft for non-existent products that we desperately need: registry tools that work and can be understood by a normal human being. RegClean is a start, but it's not much of one. What's needed is a program that looks through your program files and checks against the registry to find regis
try items that no longer refer to anything and vice versa, and really works. Everyone knows we need those tools, and it looks as if Microsoft is the only company that understands the silly registry enough to write them. I sure wish they'd get at it.
We're beginning to experiment with askSam from askSam Systems (
http://www.asksam.com/
), an old database program originally developed for DOS. It's actually quite nifty: it creates free form databases and indexes them. The indices take a while to generate, but this can be done overnight, and once done it's easy to find things. This makes askSam nearly ideal for collecting information from the Internet. More on this another time, but if you are doing a lot of downloading and the information overload is getting to you, look into askSam; it's simple to set up, simple to us
e, and very reliable.
Alex says that if you scan negatives to blow up pictures big,
clean the negatives very carefully, or you'll find giant hairs and dust motes. We're not sure why putting the same negative in a conventional enlarger and printing it doesn't have the same ugly result, although doubtless we could cobble up an explanation having to do with analog vs. digital magnification. The important point, though, is to clean those negatives. Any photo store can sell you canned air, and other stuff for negative cleaning. Alex and graphics associate David Em discovered this when they were using the new Hewlett-Packard 2500CP large format printer to make pictures several feet square. Some of Aldo Spidoni's digital pictures of space ships (you can see one on my Web site,
http://home.earthlink.net/~je
rryp/
) print up spectacularly on that new printer. Read about it in David's report below.
What we haven't found is a good slide scanner that David is happy with: either we got defective units, or there's some inherent problem with the color fidelity. More on that when we know more; we're trying to collect other slide scanner units now. I have about 1,000 slides I have taken over the years, some on my jade hunting expeditions, some in the High Sierra, and a lot of them having to do with the space program. I used to do a slide lecture that used 2 Kodak carousels; if I can find a way to scan them, I may revise my "Survival With Style" lecture on mankind's high tech future and start giving it again. Tips on good slide scanners, particularly ones that have automatic features, will be appreciated.
Before we get to David's report, it's worth mentioning that the pride of the new Chaos Manor Graphics Lab is the Intergraph TDZ-2000, known fondly as the "Blurple Machine." It's a mod-shaped tower in a color s
omewhere between deep blue and deep purple. I first saw this machine last fall just before SIGGRAPH. I was impressed then, and I still am. The Intergraph TDZ 2000 series are Pentium II machines designed for "balanced" speed, and from the single processor 2-D system at about $4300 to the dual 333 MHz 3-D system at about $13,500, they are a lot of machine for the dollar. The high-end system actually outperforms Silicon Graphics workstations costing several times as much. BYTE called this "the indisputable champ," and for details read our full review in "Eight Heavy-Hitting NT Workstations" (January Hardware Lab Report). I also gave the TDZ 2000 my User's Choice Award last month.
I don't know about benchmarks, but I can say that we use this system for real jobs, and while some of David's more complicated graphics designs can bring the system (ours is the dual 300 MHz Pentium II system) to its knees, it does the job, from creation and animation to rendering. If you're doing CAD or NT-based graphics, one or a
nother of these Blurple machines is very likely to be exactly what you need. They're fast, they run impressively cool, they ace out in benchmarks, but mostly they really work: the Intergraph "balanced system" concept that matches memory, bus speed, disk speed, and graphics accelerators is very much on target.
Now for David Em's graphics report:
Big Pictures
Over the years I've made quite a few digital prints, using everything from desktop dye sublimation printers to color laser and inkjet systems that cost upwards of a hundred thousand bucks. By and large my experience, especially making big prints, has been that it's both expensive and a hassle, especially with PC's.
Last month, Hewlett Packard lent us one of their DesignJet 2500CP large-format ink-printers (
http://www.hp.com/peripherals/lfprinters/
) to test, and after having put it through its paces, I'm convinced we've entered a new era in digital printing, at least so far as the hassle and expense factors go.
The $12,000 DesignJet 2500CP is a 600 by 600 dpi PostScript 3 printer that can print on rolls of paper 36 inches wide, and up to 150 feet long; it exists happily in either the Mac or NT environment. Making big pictures means generating big files, so we hooked it up to Lazarus, our Intergraph TD 425, which has half a GB of RAM -- we wound up using every bit of it, and in the process learned a lot about file management under NT 4, which I'll get into next month.
The 2500CP weighs in at nearly two hundred pounds. It arrived a day early (a first in computer shipping history) in the middle of a rainstorm. It took three of us to haul it into the building, and two of us to set the print engine on its legs, but after assembly it's very space efficient. Loading the CMYK
ink system was literally a snap, and soon we were printing out color bars and alignment charts.
The first pictures we printed were a couple of test images HP provided, one of a forest scene, and another of a young woman in a yellow rain slicker. Printed nearly three feet by four feet, they were almost indistinguishable from photographs; I've paid hundreds of dollars to make prints of this quality on printers costing $65,000 and up. At forty cents per square foot in materials cost, the 2500CP demolishes the major expense aspect of big digital printing (commercially, however, expect to spend $5-15 per square foot, one of the most impressive retail markups I've ever heard of).
The 2500CP also makes short shrift of the digital printing hassle factor. The printer is fume-free, extremely clean, very quiet, easily networkable, and best of all, it's pretty smart. The printer knows when it's time to fill its printhead's ink reservoirs (which it does by itself), it periodically tests itself for color consi
stency and alignment, adjusting itself as necessary, and it cuts completed prints from the paper roll. Once set up, it does most of its work pretty much unattended.
300 dots per inch (dpi) is generally considered a good resolution for printing photographic quality images. In digital terms, a 30 by 30 inch image is 9000 by 9000 pixels in size, well over a gigabyte of data for a 24-bit color picture. Few of us have gigabytes of RAM lying around, so what high end printers resort to is a bit of code known as a RIP, or Raster Image Processor. (The 2500CP is also sold RIP-less as the 2000CP for $10,000.)
There are all kinds of RIPs out there. Among other things, RIPs use various image processing techniques to alias, average, and sharpen images, then recalculate them. This way you can print an image at 150 dpi instead of 300, cover four times as much area, and most of the image quality remains virtually intact. Of course, some RIPs do better than others; for my money, the 2500CP's is outstanding. I pr
inted images at a paltry 50 dpi resolution, and though a bit pixelated, they still looked great, with great color and contrast ranges. I honestly was blown away.
Another troublesome problem RIPs handle is the conversion of the computer's RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color space into the print medium's CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow Black) space. I've mentioned in previous columns the unpleasant fact that RGB and CMYK spectrums often don't translate accurately when being converted from one to the other. Again, some RIPS work better than others, and again the 2500CP delivered excellent color translations, better than some I've seen on machines costing ten times as much.
RIPS have varying degrees of intelligence built into them, and here the 2500CP gave mixed results. The software allows you to queue and nest images, so that you can print several small ones in a single pass, but we had unpredictable results, and resorted to other methods to composite pictures. The printer also has no provisions for remote op
eration, which is surprising coming from a company that has pioneered this kind of capability.
The 2500CP prints on a variety of papers, but we had our best results with a gloss, photo-quality stock, which yielded rich colors, deep blacks and sharp detail. We had problems with HP's non-gloss matte paper, including periodically having the inks cause the paper to "ruffle." The paper is advanced by series of small, star-shaped rollers, which frequently leave long indented lines on the back of the print. While HP claims you can print on anything that can go through the rollers, in fact, you must be very selective about the papers you use.
In addition to its dye-based inks, which perform spectacularly, but are not terribly permanent, HP also offers a second pigment-based inkset that is longer-lived, but harder to control. Next month we'll take a look at what you'll need to do if you want your prints to last more than a few weeks or months.
The 2500CP still has a few rough edges. I'd like to see g
reater flexibility in the media it can print on reliably, and a thorough integration of the evolving JetSend communication standard (I'd also like to see better locking wheels on the beast, it tends to shimmy a bit while it works). Nevertheless, given the quality of prints it provides at its remarkably low price point combined with its impressive ease of use, the 2500CP opens the door for designers, photographers, architects, and other visual professionals to do economically in-house what they've typically had to rely on expensive third parties for.
When HP and its competitors like Xerox and Encad get to the point where a printer in this price range can provide this level of quality color printing archivally on a wide variety of media, the printing industry will be turned upside down. We're not quite there yet, but the 2500CP shows that we're close. Very close, indeed.
Jerry's Mail
And last, a few more things my (mostly electronic) postman
brings me.
Jerry,
The point you brought up in the February Web Exclusive about the marriage of online trading and high end modeling capabilities in Excel is a synergy I hadn't yet thought of. But I seem to recall that the SEC determined the 1987 sell-off to be mostly due to computer trading, and took steps to curb and limit computer trades. The possibility of every desktop with a Pentium or better, modem, and semi-permanent connection to the Internet being able to conduct that sort of automated trading boggles the mind.
While the potential is amazing, the brokerage houses don't appear to be ready for primetime. The report from the online trading front during the Asian collapse was the same as the report from the phone-trading front -- impassable. While you can only hire so many people to answer phones, there is no real upper limit on how far you can scale up your hardware and net access services, and it's infinitely easier to have standby tech services in place than it is to have standby human
resources in place.
Once the trading firms have that figured out, processor capability will be more than adequate for whatever modeling software you care to run, and the financial world will be a different place indeed. Look for a $3000 package containing a PC, a year of real-time quotes and Internet access, and a wealth of Excel modeling plug-ins.
Bruce Dykes
bdykes@intac.com
Well, the major effect of the electronic "circuit breakers" that halt trading after sharp drops in stock prices is to let brokers call their clients and call in margins. This bails out broker houses (which now make more from trading in stocks than in commissions; one wonders if there aren't a lot of conflicts of interest) to the detriment of the small investor. But then the market has always worked to the advantage of big traders over little guys. Still, on-line trading may help even the score.
In the December issue of BYTE, you said that if you used the CAB tri
ck when setting up Win 95, the Browse button would disappear when windows asked for file locations. One day, just for the heck of it, I tried hitting alt-b at that screen, even though there wasn't a browse button. And though logic says that shouldn't work, it did: the Browse window came up. The button is gone but the code key combination isn't. Let's hear it for Microsoft!
Mark Ivey
mbivey@puc.edu
I sure didn't know that! Wow, it works! Thanks!
If you want to squeeze a bit more out of a strapped PC, you might try this wheez, long used by Unix "gnu-alls." Use PartitionMagic to make a separate partition just for the swap file. Its best to put this on the last hard drive to minimize drive letter changes. If you haven't left a letter gap between disks and CD-ROMs, do consider the mayhem a drive letter shift will cause to apps running off the latter! Also ensure that your swap file partition has 32 KB clusters. Tell Win 95 to use this drive for its swap
file. These measures guarantee an unfragmented swap file with read/write of the largest possible chunks.
Richard Bloch
richard@ecg.devon-cc.gov.uk
I've thought of that before, and on Fireball, our new server, I did it, having a 300 megabyte chunk left over in my RAID array. (Incidentally, you can read more about that in this month's BYTE.) It sure does work. I find about 100 MB is enough. But as you say, you sure don't want that drive letter to move around!
Greetings from Grenoble, France. I read your piece on hesitations (February Web Exclusive) with considerable interest. My PC is suffering from something similar. You mentioned the network glitch that you had discussed on a previous occasion. I have tried to find that in back issues of BYTE but can't. Please, could you remind me of when it was that you wrote about the solution to the problem?
Harry Forster
harryfor@vienna.alpes-net.fr
I wrote about t
hat in the March,1997 column in BYTE. In a nutshell, you must go to the Network folder in the Control Panel, and see if you have a TCP/IP binding that you don't need. If you do, either kill it, or double click, and where it gives you the option of specifying an IP address, give it a phoney one. 192.168.0.1 will not conflict with anything real. That tends to stop the periodic hesitations.
In your January 1998 Chaos Manor column, you mentioned that you bought a "no-name" Iwill motherboard from Fry's. Iwill excels in built-in SCSI motherboards. Since their boards are more expensive, the volume of sale is not large but it is a highly regarded brand name in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Don't worry! They make good boards. Other famous Taiwan brand names are Asus, Abit, and Microstar. QDI, a Hong Kong company, also makes some interesting motherboards. Micronics motherboards are also available here but can't compete with the Taiwanese brands.
B.M. Kwong
bokwong@netvigator.com
Thanks. We have had no problems with the Iwill in Phillip's system, and I would cheerfully get another for that kind of computer.
Best regards.
Jerry
Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer and BYTE's senior contributing editor. You can write to Jerry c/o BYTE, 29 Hartwell Avenue, 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/
.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: Of Evil Memory and the Lost Command
