April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, but we had so much rain and
alternating hot and cold weather last month that the prospect of flowers coming
up in Tidewater/Hampton Roads next month is slim. Not so for OS/2, though.
IBM has been advertising heavily on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal. Even
Compaq released a marketing brochure explaining why they are the best choice
for your OS/2 PC. I doubt any of that contributed to AT&T ordering 37,000
PC's pre loaded with OS/2, but AT&T knows that when you want the fastest,
most reliable PC communications, OS/2 is your best bet.
Mind you, I'm not usually a betting man. I stick to a sure thing and I
put my money on OS/2. It's not only the speed and reliability. I'm glad/2
because new OS/2 software has really been rolling off the ISV shelves lately.
For one, Keller Group just released a new Fax/Voice suite for small business.
It has all the features you could want in a FAX/Voice mail suite including
support for simultaneously using two lines. Yep. You can be receiving a FAX
on one line while you're recording a voice message on the other. Or, use one
line to send FAXes to one of you address books and receive a FAX or voice
message on the second. That's pretty useful stuff for some businesses. And,
there's more. To quote from Keller's press announcement:
"... provided for multiple voice mailboxes, fax-on-demand, remote
retrieval of voice and fax items, forwarding and paging. The same type
of fax/voice hardware is needed for both lines, but each line can be separately
controlled in the script to provide different fax and voice services on
each line."
Check out FaxWorks here.
There's another extremely useful native OS/2 program that has hit the scene.
It's RSJ's CD Writer for OS/2. Get yourself a CDR (Recorder) or CDRW (Rewritable)
CDROM drive and load up RSJ's demo. One of the neatest features about a lot
of OS/2 software is that you just install it and use it. CD Writer exemplifies
this quality. It is an IFS (Installable File System). Once you load it and
reboot you can use all your standard commands to make your own CDROM. What
I mean is that you can use COPY, XCOPY, LABEL; even FORMAT and CHKDSK on your
CDR or CDRW drive. Don't like the command line? No problem. Use the WorkPlace
Shell to drag and drop to your heart's content or use right mouse button popup
menus if you prefer that method of operation. CD Writer supports multi-session,
too. Multi-session? Yes. With single session CD software, you can record on
a CDR only once. That's pretty wasteful when you only copy a few MegaBytes.
WIth CD Writer you can open a recording session and copy files the rest of
the day. When you're done just close the session. CD Writer handles all the
details. Want to "seal" (write-protect) your CD? You guessed it,
CD Writer does that,too. The CD Writer file system even lets you erase CDRW
and record music tracks. All of this and it fits on a single diskette. But,
don't take my word for it, download the demo at RSJ's
site or check out the
review in OS/2 e-Zine.
In fact, it looked so good that I ordered a TEAC CD-R55S drive to use with
RSJ's CD Writer. It was less than $400US. I have two uses in mind. First,
it will replace my aging backup tape drive. Low media costs and excellent
aging characteristics make quality CDR's great for backups and archiving.
Second, I'll use it to deliver software updates to my customers. The latest
IntraNetware 4.11 update is over 12MB compressed. And, that's just the basic
update. Trying to get that much data on floppies is extremely difficult and
quite unreliable. If just one diskette of a multi disk PKZip set is bad,
the entire set is unusable. With CDR I can get that update easily on a 650
to 680 MB CD and have plenty of room for both Warp 3 and Warp 4 Fixpaks, some
utilities and monitoring programs, my company brochure complete with logo,
configuration files and more. The TEAC is a 12x read 4x write drive. CDR drives
are twice as fast as the current crop of CDRW drives and they cost a bit less/2.
Not only that, but with CDRW media costing 11 to 20 times more than CDR media,
I figure I can make a few mistakes, throw away a CDR or three and still come
out money ahead at the end of a year.
Great native software is not the only good news for Warpers. We're also
seeing more hot Java applications coming on the scene. ICQ (I seek you) is
an excellent chat program. ICQ runs under OS/2's Java 1.1.4 implementation.
ICQ lets you not only join special interest groups, but also create your own.
That's even better than AOL's AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). But, AIM does allow
you to have more than one user whereas ICQ's setup is more oriented toward
one person. Check out ICQ at Miribilis
or AIM at AOL.
I've been doing quite a bit of changing around on my system. I replaced
the hard drive with a 7200 RPM, Quantum 4.56GB, UltraWide SCSI. This baby
works great with my Adaptec 2940UW adapter. Burst speeds to 40MB/s and sustained
throughput up to 7MB/s make this one of the fastest drives around. The Quantum,
like most hard drives today, uses IBM's MR (Magneto-Resistive) head technology.
Granted it's not quite up to speed with IBM's
latest drives, but for the money I had to choose the Quantum. IBM is now
using Giant Magneto Resistive (GMR) head technology. GMR supersedes MR technology.
It packs twice as much data and speed as MR into the same drive platter. You
really have to hand it to IBM MicroElectronics. Those guys continue to chunk
out innovation after innovation.
Changing my hard drive put me in a position where it seemed best to install
OS/2 again rather than just restoring from backup. As I was doing that, a
quirk showed up. I started the OS/2 install. It seemed a simple way to get
into FDISK to partition my new drive. That part went just fine, but when I
went to format the partitions I found that FORMAT kept complaining about not
enough memory (I have 64MB on this box) and then stopping. That only happened
when I tried to format drive C: for HPFS. Other drives formatted with HPFS
just fine. Even drive C: would format as FAT, but I want HPFS. Luckily, I
had a set of utility disks that I had made on a system with FixPak 5 installed.
I booted to the utility disks, ran "FORMAT C: /FS:HPFS /L" and waited
until it finished. That format command forces the drive into HPFS and does
a long format. I use the long format since it does a thorough job of checking
every sector on the hard drive, discovering damaged sectors and marking them
bad. After that, the install finished flawlessly.
Last month I mentioned CyberCom's AccuCount/2, the all-in-one small business
accounting package. Apparently, they've made some progress in their bout with
their tools vendor and will soon be releasing their software. Check CyberCom's
site for more news.
I also mentioned my search for a sound card last month. I mentioned the
PCI sound card at RealTek's web
site and the TidalWave128, neither of which I purchased. The RealTek ALS300
PCI WaveTable sound card looks very good and RealTek has the OS/2 drivers
posted on their site. I alos mentioned Crystal Computing's TidalWave128. This
PnP ISA card has all 128 MIDI voices built in. At $99.95US it seemed like
a great bargain for such a full-featured sound. You can check it out at APS's web site. But, I finally settled
on an AOpen AW35 Pro. This card has all the same Crystal Semiconductor chips
as the TidalWave128. It uses the same drivers, too. But, you'll have to download
the latest from Crystal's site. Anyway, this sound card is recognized by Warp
4's install. and it loads up perfectly. It's listed by Hardware Manager as
a Crystal Business Audio. After your OS/2 install, everything works in not
only OS/2, but also Win-OS/2. That's better than even the SoundBlaster. For
my SB16, I have to use Win-OS/2's Drivers setup program (in Control Panel)
to load the SB16 drivers from the \OS2\Drivers directory. With the latest
drivers, you'll get full duplex operation, too. Look for CWOS2202.zip.
The AWE35 Pro is hard to beat for less than $40US.
Don't forget that Joshua Eklund of Digital, Inc. BBS has brought back the
official MAOS2UG BBS. Set your COMM program to dial up 757-480-0949. You'll
find the latest OS/2 files as well as Joshua's game and other info. Also,
you can download the latest Umbrella in a self-extracting executable file
for viewing with an offline browser. Once again, our thanks to Joshua for
keeping us in the information age.
Attendance remains better than it was last fall. Oh, the Avarice CD's that
were hiding around my home office did show up. I had planned to give them
away at the very successful dinner meeting, but alas they remained at my home
while the rest of us were at Golden Corral. We finally gave them away at the
March meeting. Speaking of which, Harry Scheuren gave us a look at ImpOS/2
and scanners running under OS/2 and Win-OS/2. It looks pretty easy to set
up and use this technology. Got a favorite photo? Sure you do. Just place
it under the scanner cover, open ImpOS/2 and select the scan icon. You can
preview your image by clicking the preview button. Once the photo is scanned,
you can crop the image where you like and select scan to import the image.
Save it and then change the cropping and colors or add special effects as
desired. If you want to use it for background wallpaper, save it in BMP, open
your Desktop properties, click the 'Background' tab and select your photo.
My five year old granddaughter looks really good on my monitor and she loves
to see herself as she clicks around the web. ;-)
Next month we'll meet on April 26, a Sunday at 1:30 P.M. Set up begins
at 1:00. Joshua Ecklund will show off Lotus SmartSuite for OS/2. If you have
an interest in computing you're sure to find something in Lotus SmartSuite
that you need. And, please do bring a friend. Visitors are encouraged and
welcome.
So, that's it for this month. Remember, if you have a question about OS/2
or the User Group, give us a call or send us a note. I'm Rich
Jacox, telephone 468-5885 or try Pat
Victorio our VP at 547-9145 or Linda
Ruiz, our Secretary/Treasurer at 548-0162. Linda is your best bet to make
arrangements to join.
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Copyright © 1997 Richard Jacox and The Umbrella © All rights
reserved.
