CompuNotes Notes from The Cutting Edge of Personal Computing June 14, 1997 Issue 81 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= To subscribe, send an e-mail to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com SUBSCRIBE COMPUNOTES-L FirstName LastName To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com SIGNOFF COMPUNOTES-L +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= CONTENTS My Notes: 1=> Our new website and links contest . . ., mailto:pgrote@i1.net 2=> This Issue's Winner! Reviews: 3=> Product: Cool Paper Toys - recreational Reviewed By: Gail Marsella, mailto:gbcmars@enter.net 4=> Product: Partition-It - utility Reviewed By: Don Hughes, mailto:dhughes@wwdc.com 5=> Product: Family Tree Maker II Deluxe Edition - family Reviewed By: Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com 6=> Clickables! --- BEGIN ISSUE 1=> Notes . . . We are close to unveiling our new web site. Yes, we secured a domain name and everything . . . As part of our new site we want your links! If you have a link to us on your page with the new web address we'll link to yours. To spur people to help us do this I am giving away a software suite that includes: PC Handyman by Symantec Partition It by Quarterdeck Kiloblaster Thunderscape by SSI Internet Utilities by Starfish Software Even if you have a current link with us you need to resubmit your link. When you send your email message to me at mailto:pgrote@i1.net make sure you include your fully qualified page name and the page name that has our link on it. Page Name: URL: Contact Name: URL Where CompuNotes Link will Be: Doug or I will respond with the exact URL for CompuNotes. The drawing will be random and will be made by my 7 year old daughter. She loves picking names from a hat . . . 2=> Winner! This issue's winner: None this issue. 3=> Product: Cool Paper Toys - recreational Reviewed By: Gail Marsella, mailto:gbcmars@enter.net Actually five different programs, Cool Paper Toys is really cool. Ornament Workshop, Greatest Paper Airplanes, and Animal Workshop are origami programs. All three print out paper with fold lines (and color if you have a color printer), and then provide instruction on how to make the object. (The help screen for the origami programs gives the addresses for various origami societies, too.) StickerShop allows you to create and print stickers of many different kinds (on appropriate blank sticker paper, of course.) Making Faces is just that: pick and edit features to draw composite sketches of human faces. The installation program is irritatingly unintuitive. It installs a couple of the programs, and then stops and waits for you to click more installation buttons without actually instructing you to do so. The review program came on a recordable CDROM, however, indicating a beta copy, so perhaps the final version will be better. In any event, the installation eventually finished. Of the five programs, Making Faces is the most resource-intensive and is best run on a fast 486 or Pentium. (The others run acceptably on a slower 486 machine.) It's also the most involved and interesting. You essentially do what a police artist does, combining features and adjusting them to make a specific face. There are three categories of faces to choose from - artistic, funny, and criminal - but essentially any face can be made from any category. Face parts include not only the usual eyes, ears, noses, and so on, but also cheekbones, facial shape, nose bridges, and other more sophisticated facial features. There must have been a professional artist involved in this program's design; the quality of the drawn components is very high. Once placed on the picture, any part can then be stretched out, squeezed together, or moved around the picture. You can make some convincingly alien faces with this program if you're so inclined. Ornament Workshop is the simplest program. It begins with a picture of a living room decorated for Christmas with twelve folded paper ornaments. Among them are a gift box, a toy boat and car, a star, a Santa, a reindeer, a pinwheel, and a candle. After printing a selection, you then pick the same ornament from the Ornaments menu for instruction in folding it. The folding instructions are excellent. One frame on the screen gives text instruction, and the other shows an animation of how the fold really looks. You can back up to view an instruction repeatedly, and a completion bar shows how close you are to being done. The music accompaniment is from the Philadelphia Brass Christmas CD, and you can select a soundtrack from a list of Christmas carols. Actually, all of the programs in Cool Paper Toys are accompanied by music, which is largely extraneous, but inoffensive. Greatest Paper Airplanes, the second origami program, not only provides folding instructions and printouts for fifty elaborate airplane designs, it also has historical and scientific information on flight, aerodynamics, and paper-making. There are five categories of designs: darts (simple), gliders, jets/bombers, SST/stealth, and starships. Each design has a choice of decorative artwork that can be printed on it, and you can choose to print the entire design either in filled color or in outline. Most of the designs have a top and bottom and should be printed out on both sides of the paper for best effect. The third origami program is Animal Workshop. It is generally similar to the Airplanes program in look-and-feel, but along with the animals, you can also produce complete dioramas of four distinct ecosystems: desert, jungle, ocean, and savanna. The non-animal portions of the dioramas are largely flat, but they can be printed out in full color as can all of the animals. All of the origami programs have animation to show how to fold the paper objects, but the Animal program has additional movement adjustment tools - move left, right, move one frame at a time, and so on - that seem largely unnecessary. Finally, StickerShop allows you to make stickers. The program has a large number of tools and options for creating designs, and they even tell you where you can buy the blank stock to print the stickers out on. This is an impressive group of programs. Try it out. Starhill Productions Segasoft 1-888-SEGASOFT 4=> Product: Partition-It - utility Reviewed By: Don Hughes, mailto:dhughes@wwdc.com Partition-It is not a product for the novice computer operator to use, without guidance by a more experienced person. The more advanced users should read the book and follow the suggestions given by Quarterdeck, as a little preparation will make using the program an enhanced experience. Quarterdeck makes this advertising statement Want to add up to 40% more to space on your hard drive? just Partition-It. In addition Partition-It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee to quote Quarterdeck "We guarantee your satisfaction 100%. Period. If Partition- It doesn't effortlessly increase the capacity of your hard drive, simply return it within 30 for a full refund. The only thing you have to lose is wasted space." Finally a software manufacture that offers a no nonsense money back return policy to their customers. Partition-It is supplied on CD-ROM, and takes advantage of Windows 95 AutoPlay feature to automatically start the install program. Installation is a very simple process, as all one has to do is follow the Install Wizard screen prompting. System requirements: IBM PC, PS2, or 100% compatible, with an 80386 DX, i486, 80486, AMD or Cyrix 586 or 686, or Pentium Processor. Minimum of 4 megabytes of Ram (8 megabytes recommended) 3 megabytes of free hard-drive for installation on Windows 95 or 6 megabytes on Windows 3.1x systems Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, or Windows 95 In addition you will need a blank formatted 1.44 or 1.2 floppy disk in order to make a boot disk during installation of Partition-It. You are warned on the screen and in their manual to make a recovery disk if there is a system failure during install: If you experience a system failure while using any Partition-It operation, you must not let your machine restart from the hard drive. Turn your machine off, locate the partition-It recovery disk, and restart your system from the floppy. The two computer systems utilized for testing Partition-It are: 486DX 100MHz VL bus, with 16 meg of ram, ATI WinTurbo graphics card 2X CD- ROM, SoundBlaster sound card, 540 & a 420 MB hard drives, and Pentium 100 MHz PCI bus, 16 MB ram, ATI Winturbo graphics card, SoundBlaster AW32 soundcard, 8X CD-ROM drive, 540 & a 220 MB Hard Drive. No errors where encountered during the install process on both computers. If you purchase Partition-It be sure to make a recovery disk when the program asks you to do so, or you may end up redoing your hard drive from scratch if system crashes during the install. Also it is a very good idea to back-up the hard drive before you attempt to install this program. If you lack a tape or zip drive or some other method of backing up your entire drive, then be sure to back up all your DATA files to floppies before you continue the installation. What Partition-It does from the toolbar or menus: 1. Create a new partition in selected free space (on the hard drive) 2. Delete the selected partition. 3. Move the selected partition 4. Resize the selected partition 5. Resize clusters in the selected partition 6. Move applications (from a current to new partition). 7. Provide context-sensitive help for Partition-It. The Partition-It program has two ways of viewing your hard drives, by tree view or graphical representation (default view). An added plus is that this data can be sent to your printer. Creating a new Partition to save hard drive space. Most hard drives are installed and setup as one large drive C, which is a waste of precious storage space. Using Quarterdecks example we see that; 520 Mb hard drive is preset to store data in 16K sections (or clusters). ..If you save a 20k file, your computer uses TWO 16k sections. This wastes 12k of hard drive space, which of course becomes worse as the hard drives become larger in storage capacity. As you will see in the following table from page 4 of the Quarterdeck manual: Partition Size Cluster Size 1-31 MB 512K 32-63 MB 1K 64-127 MB 2K 128-255 MB 4K 256-511 MB 8K 512-1023 MB 16K 1024-2047 MB 32K If you installed a program such as Microsoft Office (space required 99.9 MB) on a system using a partition size of 1024-2047 MB and 32K clusters the space used would be 120.28 MB - source Quarterdeck manual. The same program on a 1024 - 2047 MB hard drive, partitioned into 255 MB sections, and a cluster size of 4K would require 102 MB with an 18.26 MB space saving. Multiply this number by several large programs that take up 100 MB of space or more to install, and you quickly have the concept behind dividing up a hard drive using Partition-It. Moreover, on computer containing a 2047 MB hard drive is partition into four sections C, D, E, F, using an 8K cluster size the savings will be 16MB. There is a potential problem in partitioning a hard drive unless the end user knows how to manage a multi-partition system. Most software packages install or setup programs automatically default to install onto drive C, no matter how many drives or partitions there are on a given system. Thus an inexperienced user will put all programs on drive C, and soon run out of hard drive space, even though D, E, F, are in actuality vacant. I have found from experience this is exactly how a novice computer user responds to installing software on their system. However, with a little patience and guidance end users of multi- partitioned hard drive will learn to select the custom install when setting up their software. In a DOS or Windows system you can have up to four physical partitions on one disk C, D, E, F. On larger 2 GB and above if you wanted to keep the size under 255 MB you could create a primary partition of 255 MB (which contains the boot sector) and an extended partition of 1.5 GB(only one). Next you create logical partitions of 255 MB each in the extended partition. Then the system would have an ideal hard drive of four partitions per GB or C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, on your system. Ideally keeping the partitions under 1023 MB and 16K cluster size would work best for most users and save about 10.8 MB on the MS Office installation as above. On both of the test computers the hard drives are partitioned under 255 MB, which gives a cluster size of 4K. The 486 test computer has two drives 540 MB and the 420 MB, which gives me partitions: C, D, E, F, G, and H, the CD-ROM drive. The drives where partitioned before the testing of Partition-It, using the dinosaur DOS program FDISK--If there was ever a program utility that badly needed upgrading and made far more user friendly its Fdisk. The good news is that Quarterdeck listened to the public and have designed Partition-It as an easy to use Windows program. Now a computer user can increase, decrease, and delete any partition with the click of a button. Partition-It appeared happy with way my drives are partitioned, and did not recommend changing the size to save space. However, I thought it would be fun to see if the program lived up to its claims that: one can resize an existing partition, create a new one in the saved space, plus move a program from one drive to the newly created drive. An advantage of Partition-It is its ability not only to move the program, but update the changes to the registry and other necessary files. I had 75 MB of free space on drive G, which is my catch all for Internet downloads and program testing. I clicked drive G, from the drive tree display, then clicked on the Resize Partition toolbar button. Partition-It displayed a color graphic bar chart (single line) showing you the amount of free space available. Before you can create a new Partition on an existing drive you must free up space or create an empty space, the create the partition in the new empty space. The display also has Empty Space Left and Empty Space Right at each end of the bar, allowing the user to insert the free space before or after the current drive. Each of the Empty Space boxes have up and down arrows that up click on to increase or decrease the new Empty Space size. I had chosen the right side and click on the up arrow time I had the size set of the free space at 68 MB. After selecting the size you just click on the OK button and the Partition-It does the all the resizing work and creates the free space. Next you select simply click on the free space from Partition-It's drive tree and then click on the tool bar Create Partition button. The Graphic display tells you the size of the new partition and you can label or name the partition, then click on the OK button, and you are done. The drive tree will display the new partition, but will display it as (in my case) H, and as unassigned. You must reboot the system in order for Windows to assign a new letter to the CD-ROM drive. Once the system rebooted H, was the new 68 MB partition and the CD- ROM was assigned the drive number drive I. The time to resize and then create a new partition as drive H, was under five minuets, and completely hassle free. The next step was to attempt the moving of one program to the newly created drive. I opted to move Drag & File from G, drive to H, drive and clicked on the Move Application tool bar button. The program started to scan all the drives in the system, which took a few minuets, as it makes a copy of the drive information. Once completed I clicked on Drive G, and selected the entire DFGOLD95 directory and all related files to be moved to the new drive. The program was moved to drive H and worked like a charm without any errors or related problems cropping up. I then decided to reset my hard drive back to the way it was before, so I moved Drag and File back to G, drive. Then I used the Delete Selected Partition tool bar button, to remove the new H, drive. However, I hit a problem as I had Norton's Recycle bin protection turned on, and Partition-It would not let me delete the partition. Turning off Norton's recycle bin protection eliminated the problem and I was able to remove the partition I created earlier. I then resized my drive G, partition to include the remaining free space on the drive. The process completed, I restarted the computer and switched to Drag and File, which I first moved to the new partition, then moved back to its original location. The Drag and file program are working without any errors encountered to-date. Quarterdecks Partition-It program works exactly as they claim, and I am happy to report with no glitches. Not only can it resize, and create partition on the fly in windows, thus allowing the user to quickly make the new free space active. You can also move programs from one drive to another without hesitation or doubt that they will work. For any of you who have exasperated over Fdisk to make partitions, you will find Partition-It a much better, and user friendly product. If you have a large hard drive and want to save up to 40% of storage space, then take a good look at Partition-It. Quarterdeck Corporation 13160 Mindanao Way Marina del Ray CA 90292-9705 USA Product Information (800) 683-6696 FAX: (813) 523-2391 Price: $49.95 (US) Ratings: Install/Ease of Use: Gold User Friendliness: Gold Quality: Gold Customer Support: Gold End User: Advanced and power computer users 5=> Product: Family Tree Maker II Deluxe Edition - family Reviewed By: Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com Requirements: Windows, CDROM, MSIE 3.0/NN 3.0 for Internet capabilities MSRP: $89.99 I'll admit that until a few years ago I had never really thought much about my own personal genealogical backgrounds. Several events changed my mind, including Ken Burn's wonderful Civil War series on PBS and the death of both of my grandmothers. Being a history buff, I began to wonder more and more about my own roots, and in the last year or so finally began to put things together and assemble a family tree. And then Broderbund came along and deposited this wonderful program on my lap to review for CompuNotes. It was almost as if somebody upstairs had decided to help in my quest. Broderbund's Family Tree Maker is in its second incarnation, and now comes bundled with tons of extra goodies to aid you in your search for your roots. The Deluxe Edition is definitely that; it comes with some four CDs packed with information that can be helpful in searching for ancestral roots. Only one CD is required for the actual program - the remainder include a 2 CD set comprising the Social Security Death Index (1937- 1995) and the final CD is volume 1 of the World Family Tree, containing some 12,000 actual family trees contributed to Broderbund's World Family Tree project. If that wasn't enough, the box includes a 400+ page manual describing how to use the software and - AND- Broderbund has created a special web site, www.familytreemaker.com, where you can obtain updated information, search other family trees, or create your own personal home page with your family tree and genealogical information you are looking for. Even considering the price, this is one incredible piece of software for assembling your family tree. Once installed, using Family Tree Maker is simple and easy. The program can create multiple family trees, opening to the last one saved by default. Once a new tree has been started it opens to the Family Page, which is where most of the user interaction occurs. Essentially the page is a form, providing fields for inputting date of birth, date of death, special notes, marriage(s), spouse(s) and children. Two very interesting things pop up very quickly. For example, as I was inputting my name and pertinent information, up popped several tabs on the right hand side of the screen such as Parents of Doug, Parents of Debbie, and Allison (my daughter). Clicking on these tabs brings up the page for that information - so by clicking on Parents of Doug I could then input information about my parents. Very slick, and it allows you to very easily and quickly input information and generate at least a very small family tree. The other interesting feature is that Family Tree Maker does allow you to input Scrapbook photos for family members, including pictures in pretty much all commonly used graphics file formats (even Kodak PhotoCDs). Another nice touch was the ability to input personalized information about a person, such as my grandmother's preferred middle name (Rose). You can also insert personal stories describing incidents or events in the person's life. But Family Tree Maker doesn't just allow you to input the information and view it in such a rudimentary format; Family Tree Maker comes with a considerable number of ways to view the information and generate printouts or reports on your family tree. For example, using the ancestor report form I could see the typical flow-chart style family tree layout showing who my ancestors were, or using the descendant report form I could see who my great-grandfather's descendants were. You can even print calendars showing all birth/death/marriage information for your family tree. Everything about the reports you generate can be customized to look the way you want, from plain boxes to fancy line styles and text fonts. Family Tree Maker doesn't stop there. To help you with your search for information, the Deluxe Edition includes the Social Security Death Index and the World Family Tree (volume 1). In addition to these, Broderbund has Marriage Index CD's available (grouped by state), Land Records, Military Records, in all some 45 CDs are available to help you find out more about your family. Searching these can help turn up information about lost or missing relatives. In addition, considerable resources are available on the Internet to help find out more. Broderbund has the Family Tree Maker site (www.familytreemaker.com), however, almost any search engine can be used to find sites that help find genealogical information. For people looking to find out more about themselves and their families, Family Tree Maker is a must have. For one thing it is easy to use and provides a wealth of information at your fingertips. For another, it provides an incredibly valuable resource for focusing and organizing your genealogical information, allowing you to spend more time searching and less time trying to figure out how to organize or even show what you've found. For those interested in compiling genealogical information to others, it should be noted that Broderbund prohibits resale of the information provided on the World Family Tree or the Social Security Death Index however you are allowed to charge for time spent using Family Tree Maker to gather and compile the information. A trial version is available from the website to give you the chance to test drive Family Tree Maker, something I recommend but have no doubts that you will end up buying this product. Gold medals all around for Family Tree Maker II! Broderbund Software P.O. Box 6125 Novato, CA 94948-6125 (800) 474-8696 (415) 382-4419 fax Web: www.familytreemaker.com Installation: Gold User-Friendliness: Gold Quality: Gold User: Anyone interested in their family roots 6=> Clickables! Sites Doug and I have come across this week you may be interested in: None this issue. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Managing Editor: Patrick Grote -- mailto:pgrote@i1.net Assistant Editor: Writer Liaison: Doug Reed-- mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com Archives: ftp://ftp.uu.net/published/compunotes/ Website: e-mail: mailto:notes@inlink.com fax: (314) 909-1662 voice: (314) 909-1662 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= CompuNotes is: Available weekly via e-mail and on-line. We cover the PC computing world with comprehensive reviews, news, hot web sites, great columns and interviews. We also give away one software package a week to a lucky winner for just reading our fine publication! Never dull, sometimes tardy, we are here to bring you the computing world the way it is! Please tell every on-line friend you know about us! CompuNotes B440 1315 Woodgate Drive St. Louis, MO 63122 notes@inlink.com +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= END OF ISSUE .