dacs.doc electric

OUR PRESENTER at the DACS May General Meeting was Gene Barlow, representing PowerQuest and several other software houses. Gene had been with IBM for 34 years, the last 14 working with user groups. When he retired, he moved to Utah and set up his own company, User Group Relations, representing products to User Groups around the country. He last spoke at our DACS meeting in October 1998.

It’s always a pleasure to have Gene Barlow visit. His easygoing style and clear explanations make the complex world of PCs (Personal Confusers) a little easier to understand. This visit was no exception.

Gene started by introducing us to AmazingMail, a mail-order company that prints personalized postcards from graphics or photos that you send them. AmazingMail produces the cards, adds the postage, and mails them for you. Gene distributed a sample card and told us how to take advantage of a very special introductory offer.

Gene talked next about Caldera Systems’ Open Linux 2.4. He explained why, with all the current interest in Linux, this might be one of the several packaged versions to look at. The User Group price of $25 for Open Linux V2.4 is too good to pass up. It includes an extensive manual, so it is well worth the price just to learn a little bit of what Linux is all about.

The main presentation featured PowerQuest Corp., a global provider of storage-device management solutions. Rather than spending all of his time reviewing the features of each product, Gene began by giving us the reasons for using them. This approach was a refreshing change from the usual pattern of reeling off a long list of product descriptions. Then he launched into a tutorial of how you might organize your hard drive(s) to take advantage of good disk practices, and recommended one or more PowerQuest products that might fulfill each function or task.

One of Gene’s recommendations was to have two hard drives. Drives are now so relatively cheap and fast that they’re probably the best system enhancement you can buy, after more memory. He also suggested another efficiency measure: converting from FAT16 to FAT32 partitions for more efficient cluster sizes and to allow for partitions greater than 2GB.

The tutorial continued with a set of suggestions on how to organize primary and logical partitions. If you put the operating system on one partition, applications on another, and data on yet another, you can maximize the backup possibilities by making recovery easier and far less painful. He talked about how Partition Magic 5.0 might specifically support the procedure he suggested. Organizing the partitions on two hard drives can easily be handled utilizing the Drive Image and DataKeeper products.

Gene remarked that system crashes often come from too much junk in the Registry. He explained how using another PowerQuest product, SecondChance, might help by keeping recoverable system checkpoints. My own experience is that most people just have too much on their hard drives. Gene remarked that anything that doesn’t run on a regular basis should be removed from your system, minimizing the risk of crashes. I must agree. He suggested creating a TEMP operating system partition to try new applications before installing them on your main system. If they don’t work well or are unstable, you can just delete the TEMP partition without disrupting your entire system and probably your life. Note: this does require that each of the partitions be selectively bootable. The Partition Magic package has a utility, Boot Magic, to handle this if you’d like to try it.

An order form, which included a short summary of Gene’s presentation, was available at the meeting. The forms offered PowerQuest products at special user-group prices and are good for 30 days. All the products can also be ordered from www.ugr.com.