HALIFAX AREA
 		PERSONAL COMPUTER SOCIETY

NEWSLETTER                    JANUARY 1996


Meets 4th Sunday of each month, 7:00 pm
     Note Change of Location
     Veteran's Memorial Hospital, Room 1613A
     Corner of Robie and Jubilee Road, Halifax, N.S.

28 January Meeting

Intro Topics   - Windows Feature
               - Question and Answer

FEATURE EVENT  - MODEM DEMONSTRATION
               - Downloading Files


In This Month's Issue:

Announcements

Shall We Sub-divide The Lot?
Partitioning your hard drive

Worth Paying For ...Well Let's See - Part Two
Shareware review continued

Hard Drives and More Hard Drives Continued
More on hard drives, installing and problems

The Newsletter
A few notes about what goes into this document

Meeting Schedule 95/96
Meeting dates for the remainder of the year

General Information

This document is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who
has attended a meeting within the past three months.  Yearly
membership dues are $15.00.  The text of the newsletter is
available on Chebucto Community Net and local bulletin boards.
Society Mailing Address -
    P.O. Box 185 Stn. Main, Dartmouth N.S., B2Y 3Y3
Executive
    Chairperson - David Potter
    Vice-Chair - Bill Marchant - 477-2069 (h)
    Secretary/Newsletter Editor - Colin Stuart - 461-0370 (h)
    Treasurer - Garth Bennett - 492-3368 (h)
    Disk Librarian - Thayne MacLean - 461-0082 (h)
    and also Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Arthur Layton, Rob
MacCara,
    Andy Cornwall, George Richards, and Diane Smith


ANNOUNCEMENTS

There are not very many this month.  I have repeated the notice
about the change of location from last month.  We also have the
notices for other groups and a want ad.

				Last Planning Meeting

The last planning meeting was held a little while ago, on Monday,
4 December at NSIT.  As this was a fairly productive meeting with
topics being decided on for the next few months, we didn't have a
planning meeting in January.

The next meeting will be our second at the Veteran's Hospital. 
The meeting will feature a demonstration of how to use modem for
various tasks.  It will include downloading files, unzipping them
and checking for viruses.  In February we will look at assorted
Tax programs, seeing as it is that time of year.

Society Address Change
Please note the new mailing address for the Society:

P.O. Box 185, Stn. Main
Dartmouth, N.S.
B2Y 3Y3

We've Moved!

In August we wrote to the Principal of the Institute of
Technology Campus  to renew the agreement to hold the Society
meetings there.  We received a reply stating that we would be
welcome provided we paid a fee of $50.00 per night commencing in
January 1996.  For a number of Planning Meetings this item has
been on the agenda with the result that a successful search has
been conducted for an alternate meeting place.  The result is
that commencing in January 1996 we now have a new meeting
place.

Commencing in January 1996 the regular monthly meetings of the
Society will be held in Room 1613A of the Veteran's Memorial
Hospital (VMH) at the corner of Robie Street and Jubilee Road, 
Halifax.  The planning meetings will be held in a different room
in the same building.  These facilities are provided at no cost
to the Society.

We owe our thanks to Diane Smith who negotiated the details on
behalf of the Club.  Reservations for the desired space have been
made until the end of June 1996.

There is underground parking available at the VMH at a cost of
$1.10 /hour.  For anyone who wishes to use it, the elevator from
the parking area takes you directly to the lobby.  The parking
bill is paid to the concessionaire in the lobby when you go to
return to your car.  There is also parking available on the
nearby streets.  Both Robie Street and Summer Street have parking
meters, and at our meeting time on Sunday evening they are most
likely to be uncontested by others.  

Membership Expiry Dates

For those of you who are not already aware, the membership expiry
dates are printed in the upper right corner of your newsletter
mailing label.  If you wish to continue to receive this
newsletter and know what interesting meetings are coming up, you
either have to renew ($15 per year) or come to the meetings and
put your name on the list that is passed around.

DELPHI
The Metro Halifax Delphi Developers Group meets on the first
Tuesday of each month at 7:00pm.  The meetings are held at the
CCL Group Building 2669 Dutch Village Road, Halifax.

Further information may be obtained from Dave Hackett at
835-3894, CIS:71650,2646 or from Carey Rolfe at 462 4551 or
e-mail rolfe@ra.isisnet.com.

OS/2 Users Group
The regular meeting of the Greater Halifax OS/2 Special Interest
Group are held on the second Wednesday of each month at the
office of IBM at Purdy's Wharf Tower Two in Halifax.  Further
information may be obtained from Donovan Long at 422 1975 or by
e-mail at tsst@isisnet.com.

For Sale:
2 600mb Sony M/O disks
1 Pixon Typestry w/ 128 textures, Mac or Windows
6 Mac CD's - reference, dinosaurs, etc.

Contact Ken Mayfield - 466-3017


Advertising and Want Ads
We don't charge for small individual want ads such as the ones
above.  That is any Society member or other interested person
with some computer related item that they wish to sell, trade, or
give away can contact the editor to place an ad in the
newsletter.  We would expect that more commercially oriented
advertising provide the Society with some remuneration for
carrying the ad.

An ad will normally only appear once but let me know if you need
it repeated.  Ads can be given to me at meetings or give me a
call two weeks to ten days before the next general meeting
(newsletter deadline).

SHALL WE SUB-DIVIDE THE LOT?
by Bill Marchant

Anyone planning to get a new hard disk, or a new computer will be
concerned with the question of whether to partition the disk or
not.  What are the pros and cons of partitioning?  And if
partitioning is to be used, are there optimum sizes for the
partitions?

Here are some of the criteria that I have discovered over the
past few years, which may help  others in making their decisions. 
The arithmetic shown here is valid for DOS, and all versions of
Windows.  It does not apply to OS/2 systems when the High
Performance File System (HPFS) is used, but remember OS/2 can
also use the FAT system, and you  may wish to install it that
way.

A hard disk like all other disks is divided into sectors.  All
DOS sectors are the same size.  That is they always have room for
512 bytes of data or program.  The DOS system uses the File
Allocation Table (FAT) to keep track of what is in the various
sectors.  The FAT uses a 16 bit number to number the storage
units.  This means that the maximum number of storage units is
limited to 65,518.  This number of units of 512 bytes each would
mean that the largest disk would be limited to approximately 30
Mbytes, consequently DOS arranges for sectors to be grouped
together in clusters.  Possible cluster sizes for drives under
2 Gbytes consist of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 sectors.  The cluster
size used depends on the maximum size of the drive.

The first two columns of the table show the number of bytes that
can be stored in the various cluster sizes. 

Sectors      Bytes        Max Drive      Max Drive      Max Drive
per Cluster  per Cluster  Size in Bytes  Size in Gbytes Size in
Mbytes
2             1024          67,090,432      0.062483      
63.9824 
4             2048         134,180,864      0.124966     
127.9648 
8             4096         268,361,728      0.249931     
255.9297 
16            8192         536,723,456      0.499863     
511.8594 
32           16384       1,073,446,912      0.999725    
1023.7188 
64           32768       2,146,893,824      1.999451    
2047.4375 

The last three columns show the maximum drive size that can be
handled by each cluster size.  Note that the difference between
the figures shown in the last three columns is not just a factor
of 1000.  I have used 1024.  If you are selecting  partition
sizes, be aware that selecting 127 Mbytes will actually give you
more than 134,000,000 bytes.

The point of knowing about cluster size is that the larger the
cluster size, the greater the amount of space that is wasted in
storing small files.  On the average, the amount of storage space
lost is equal to the number of files on the disk multiplied by
half of the cluster size. 

Looking at the table again, notice that with 2 clusters per
sector, the maximum drive size is 63.98 Mbytes.  The lost storage
for 2000 files will be 1000 x 1024 = 1 Mbyte.  If you have a disk
of 64 Mbytes your cluster size will double.  The lost storage for
the same number of files will be 1000 x 2048 = 2 Mbytes.  If you
are going to have a partition just over 63 Mbytes in size, the
table shows that you  might as well make it 127 Mbytes.  The
ratio of lost space per file remains the same throughout the
range 64 to 127. 

With new hard disks of 1.2 Gbytes or even 1.6 Gbytes,
partitioning them into pieces of 127 Mbytes each would result in
having a large number of drive letters to deal with.  The
possible result would be user confusion about what was in each
drive, and wasted time in trying to find files.  It is likely
that most users will opt for partition sizes of 500 Mbytes as a
reasonable compromise in order to keep the number of drives to a
manageable number. 

One scheme which might fit some hardware would be to make a
smaller partition of say 120 Mbytes and use it for the operating
system.  this would be your C: drive. Put Windows 95 and possibly
some other useful bits like batch files in it and then divide the
rest up into 500 Mbyte chunks.  This might give you a C: D: and
E: drive which would not be to difficult to keep track of.  One
arrangement might be to keep all your changeable data in one
drive.  That way, backing up becomes much easier.  Anyway, I hope
the above table will be helpful in making the decisions.

WORTH PAYING FOR?.....WELL, LET'S SEE! - Part Two
by John Howard Oxley

(This is continuation of John's review of some shareware utility
programs - ed.)

ARV:  Is a DOS file database program using floppies (not a
diskette cataloguer as I originally  thought) which turned out
not to be of any use to me.

Greg Mitchell's Utilities:  This is a free set of DOS utilities
(add/remove directories to your path,  copy large directories to
diskettes, change cursor appearance, test a file for age in days,
Julian  date information, provide system information/services via
errorlevel [for batch file programming],  password control, file
readers, screen saver, carriage return stripper for text files,
and batch file  stepping) and once again, superfluous in my
current circumstances, though all tested worked well under DOS
when I tried them.

Track'n'Trend:  This financial forecasting system when installed
to a Drive E: said it would not  start on a network drive, even
though the drive in question was not a network drive.  I did not
pursue this further.

XLPower:  Is a set of add-in functions and tools for EXCEL 5.0. 
I have not had time to evaluate  these [partly because of
problems with EXCEL itself, in no way related to this product]
and of course, they likely won't work [in their current version]
with the W95 version of EXCEL.

InterNet Notebook:  This is an address book for the InterNet
modeled on a spiral notebook; it would not run under NT though it
worked fine under WfWg.  In any event, WEBODEX is so superior
that I did not investigate this entry further.

Task Server:  Allows you to start a program/process on a NT/W95
computer on a network from any other computer on the network. 
Evidently a powerful and complex utility, I did not have my 
network working at the time I installed this and have not gotten
around to it since.

Icon Manager 32:  The Registry for this 32-bit icon management
tool was trashed at some point,  requiring a re-install around to
which I have not gotten -- if this utility works, it will serve a
major  need for the icon-intensive 32-bit user.

MindMapper:  Is a note-taking system which allows you to produce
a graphic display of concepts  words aiding creative writing,
study, and brainstorming for meetings [this sounds a lot like the
$250 commercial tool called IDEA FISHER].  Because it is not
immediately transparent as a tool,  further evaluation of this
has had to be postponed.

SkyMap:  This is a well-established astronomy program which puts
a planetarium in your  computer.   Very powerful and easy to use,
I found this worth registering even though I am by no  means an
astronomy buff; someone who is would find this irresistible.  The
basic registered version (U$ 39.00 + $5.00 S&H from Mr. Chris
Mariott JASC Inc. 10901 Red Circle Drive, Suite 340 Minnetonka,
MN 55343, VISA accepted) has 88,000 stars and a sky object
description database; another U$10.00 gets you the Professional
Edition with 259,0000 stars and the ability to read Hubble CD-ROMs
[whatever they are].  This is, on the main review machine, a very
fast  program and remarkably easy to use, making a manual
unnecessary.  The product is extensively  customizable -- you
can set the time and place of viewing, and Halifax is one of the
sites in the locations database included.  Installation is also
entirely straightforward.  This may not be as graphically
gee-whiz as some of the commercial competition, but given that it
costs less than half as much as the cheapest of these, this is
entirely acceptable.

Seiko Label Printer Driver for WINDOWS NT:  Unfortunately, this
is for the SEIKO Label Printer  PRO, not the PLUS [which is what
I have], and the author has no intention of supporting the 
latter system.

CD-Quick:  Is a CD-ROM caching program; since it must run as a
DOS TSR it is not easily used  under NT, won't work under W95 at
all, and since I am no longer running WfWg 3.11, I did not 
pursue this one further.

Application Control:  Is intended to be a permanent monitor
utility for installs/uninstalls.  Under  NT this caused any other
installation program to GPF [which is hard to do in NT!]; the
program  uninstalled ITSELF quite gracefully.  While the program
did work under WfWg, is was very  memory/resource intensive and
appeared to cause some system instability.  I suspect it would
not work at all under W95, and overall, was simply more trouble
than it was worth.

FileScan 1.2:  Super multiple disk file scanning utility [by name
and with text included], available in both 16- and 32-bit
versions.  Has a painless install, is easy to use [no manual,
none needed],  powerful, and fast [the 32-bit version searched a
1,033Mb hard disk in 4 partitions each with  hundreds of
directories and over 20,000 files total and found 13 examples of
CONTROL.* in 54  seconds].  I use this utility constantly, and
the only drawback is that despite what the FILE.DIZ says, you
cannot operate on groups of files once they are found [e.g. you
can't find all .TMP files across your disks and delete them all
at once] though in response to my query, the manufacturers
said they intended offering this in the next edition.  U$19.95 +
$6.50 shipping from MicroGuru Corporation, P.O. Box A315,
Chicago, IL 60690-3519, USA.

So there you have it: of 25 programs, one worth keeping was free,
and three were worth paying for.  Of the remaining 21, 14 were
rejected for one reason or another, about half of them because
they just did not work on my system, and the other 7 will get
re-evaluated sometime.  In terms of being "worth paying for"
immediately, this means even for the selected programs, the
"survival rate" is 16%.   In light of the fact that there were
over 1,000 files on the CD-ROM, the rate becomes minuscule. 
There are times I think that shareware is like spawning
salmon -- not many of the starters ever make it to the finish
line!

HARD DRIVES AND MORE HARD DRIVES
by Colin Stuart

Last month I wrote a bit about putting one of those new large IDE
hard drives in an older computer.  I haven't had much of a chance
to research this but I have worked on a few computers lately that
don't and some that do support the large drives.  

How can one easily tell if the computer supports large hard
drives?  It has to have a BIOS that supports the EIDE (enhanced
IDE) standard.  One relatively easy way to check is to look at
the BIOS screen that appears when you first start up your
computer.  If it says something about a primary and a secondary
IDE channel then it should support large drives.  This primary
and secondary channel stuff is part of the EIDE standard and
means that you can have up to four IDE devices in your computer
whereas the older IDE only allowed two devices.

There are a number of other new features of the EIDE standard
that I won't go into here.  Maybe in a future article.  If your
computer is an older one, like maybe over a year old, it probably
does not have built in EIDE support.  There were local bus
controllers made that supported EIDE.  Some of these required
that you load a device driver in order to take advantage of the
EIDE features.  Without the driver you possibly got just a fast
I/O card.  Many also required that a driver be loaded for
Windows.  This would replace the device=*wdctrl line in the
[386Enh] section of the system.ini file with a driver that would
be supplied with the local bus I/O card.

Earlier I wrote about using a program like Disk Manager from
Ontrack to make use of a large hard drive on an older system. 
This is one way to get around the problem but it means loading a
driver every time you boot up.  This driver is loaded prior to
your config.sys being executed.  I have noticed that different
drive manufacturers supply different programs.  Last month I
mentioned Seagate's setup.  They put a program right on the hard
drive in a 20 meg partition that works similarly to Disk Manager. 
Conner has one supplied on a floppy disk.

Another way is to use a card with an enhanced BIOS like the DTC
1181.  I got one of these from our friend, Ken-Porter of K-PC
Lte.  This is only $28 and allows you to get the full capacity
of a big hard drive without having to use Disk Manager or some
other program.  I think that this is probably the best way to go
if you want use the full amount of space on a drive larger than
528 meg.

Changing the subject line a bit here, I think I will relate a
couple of recent experiences with hard drives that some of you
might find interesting.  One person at work started to get GPFs
(General Protection Faults) in Windows.  She said that she was
just sitting there doing some work and not even touching the
computer when it would make a noise and then a GPF would appear.

I thought this was a bit strange.  You sometimes feel like a
doctor asking a patient to describe the symptoms, "well what
happens when you do this?".  I checked her Windows setup and
everything seemed basically okay.  I updated a couple of files
that dealt with Windows and the Novell LAN that afternoon but
that didn't explain away the noise.  Next morning I went over and
decided to run some diagnostics.  Start with the basics I
thought, just run scandisk and see what happens.  Wow, it
didn't make it that far.  The first part of the drive was okay
but it started to have problems and generated a bunch of error
messages.

Time to save what data that could be saved.  Tried to copy all
the files to a network drive but that didn't work.  Had to do it
directory by directory and ignore the ones that were too bad. 
Something was really wrong.  The drive made all kinds of bashing
noises at times and then you got a "General failure reading drive
C:" message.  I also got lots of "Data error reading drive C:"
and "Sector not found reading drive C:"  I told her that her hard
drive was toast.  Luckily I managed to get most of the data files
off.  I didn't worry about the programs as they could be
re-installed on a new drive.

After getting the data off I tried Norton's Disk Doctor on it.  I
let it run for an hour or so but it was finding lots of bad
sectors so I stopped it.  I checked the date that the computer
was bought and found that the warranty had run out but that the
manufacturer of the hard drive had a two year warranty.  So I
sent it back.  The vendor was nice enough to handle that for us.

Had another drive that had been in one computer and then replaced
with a larger one.  I decided one day to put this in a computer
that I was setting up as I didn't need a very large drive in it. 
When I tried to use the BIOS setup auto identify drive routine,
Nothing happened.  It just sat there saying "Auto-identifying
drive C".  I waited and waited and it didn't find the drive.  I
checked everything and tried again.  Same thing happened.  The
drive would not auto-identify.  Tried putting the drive data
directly into the CMOS.  Wouldn't boot up.  So I tried
another drive from the same manufacturer and it worked fine. 
Tried the balky one and again nothing.  I phoned the company down
in the US of A and they said "its still under warranty - send it
to our authorized repair depot in Canada".  This turned out to be
a company which I have dealt with before - CNS up in Oakville.

There are only a few places in Canada that can repair drives. 
There are none in Atlantic Canada.  I think there is one
someplace around Montreal and there are a couple in the Toronto
area.  I don't know if there are any out west.  Usually, if the
drive is out of warranty, it is easier just to get a new one. 
The CNS people can actually fix your drive sometimes and send it
back with all the data on it.  That is cool.  It can cost some
money though if you have to pay for it, but it can be worth it if
you haven't backed up.

So I think that this is a good spot to end for this month. 
Remember to always back up your important data and to check for
viruses and such nasties.

ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER

Newsletter Articles
We are almost always in need of good articles.  If anyone has
something that they feel would make a good article, an
interesting story to tell, or even a good meeting topic, please
don't hesitate to pass it on.

Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI
Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect. 
How does one get an article to me?  Various ways are available. 
You can bring it to a meeting or give me a call and upload it to
me.  If you are on the Chebucto FreeNet, Internet, or any type of
e-mail system that has a gateway to the Internet, you can send
something to me via the internet to where I work -
hlfxtrad.educ.stuartce@gov.ns.ca or stuartce@ednet.ns.ca.

It does work, but if you are sending a file attachment to your
message to me at the gov.ns.ca address, it should be UUencoded
and not a mime attachment.  The ednet email works fine with
regular mime encoding.

Newsletter Production Notes
For those who may be interested, the newsletter was formatted
this month with WordPerfect for Windows 6.1 running on either a
Pentium 75 or 120.  Both have 16 megs of RAM.

Much of the clipart used is from Novell (formerly WordPerfect)
Presentations 3.0 which comes as part of the Perfect Office
Suite.  The only problem is that there isn't a printed list of
the images so you have to  root' around a bit.

The original was printed at 600 dots per inch resolution on a HP
Laserjet 4 Plus.  The main body of the newsletter is set in 10
point Palatino with the article headings being 14 point bold. 
The title on the first page is ITC Zapf Chancery Medium Italic
19.2 and 16 points.

There were about 65 copies produced this month of which around 60
were mailed out.  Any extra copies from the previous few month's
issues that I have will be brought to the next meeting for those
who are new to the group or may not be in regular attendance.

I do have a complete set of all the previous newsletters and if
someone wanted to look through these, let me know and I can bring
them to the next meeting.

MEETING SCHEDULE - 1996

The dates for this year's meetings  are listed below. 

28 January
25 February
24 March
28 April
26 May
23 June

The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8
days) after the general meeting.  They are also located at the
Veteran's Hospital.  Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning
of future meetings or events.

Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where
possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this
newsletter.