New computer at last

["Dr J.L. Gordon" jgordon@xxxxxxxx]

Hi folks,

This is a mundane message (no XPL tips, no OS flames), but I feel the
need to tell you about my new computer. In Australia, a land blessed
with a high quality of life, we do suffer one distinct drawback in
comparison to the USA: electronic consumer goods are rather more
expensive. While Australia has one of the highest percentages of
computer ownership per capita in the world, this comes at a price. Old
machines take longer to retire. Two weeks ago, I replaced my 1990
vintage 386sx with a Pentium 100 16MB machine. Now I'm in hawg heaven.
The new machine came with Win95 installed on a 1.2GB FAT drive. I used
Partition Magic to repartition the disk and install Boot Manager for
OS/2, without removing Win95. (There was 500MB of pre-installed
software!) And, I got back something like 100MB of wasted space that
resulted from the big cluster size of the large single partition. When
time permits, I'll compare Win95 to OS/2. I've put my versions of
XyWrite on the (reduced) FAT partition so that both os's will be able
to see
them.

I installed XyWin (under WIN-OS2) and again faced the problem of the
terminal font. On this screen (at 1024 x 760), the default was
unreadable. Using Doug Beeson's tip, I have a readable screen again,
but with the speed of the new computer I will probably work in graphics
mode more often. Yesterday I installed Xy4 and was delighted to find
that Orbis works. Fingers crossed. It was never stable on my laptop and
this was a big disappointment since one of the reasons I upgraded to
Xy4 was to get the Orbis database and indexing features. I'm starting a
research project on Indonesian Christianity this year and looking
forward to giving Orbis a good workout.

There was one hiccup in the Xy4 install: the install program crashed
when it found the CD-ROM, my first ever. I made a DOS from Drive A disk
and ran that from the OS2 desktop to complete the install. I hope TTG
has fixed this by now (the version I was installing was 4.016) because
it doesn't look good if your software fails to install on a machine
just because it has a CD-ROM.

Despite the fact that I really like Describe, I keep coming back to
XyWrite for its stellar ability to handle text. As long as words are my
main business, Xy will be hard to beat. And, like Annie, I find the
clear, uncluttered screen of this old DOS word processor to be an asset
rather than a liability.

The old computer? I thought you'd never ask: I've installed GeoWorks
Ensemble with some DOS games, and given it to my 11 year old daughter.
The even older 286 also runs GeoWorks. And the Kaypro CPM with Perfect
Writer is up in the garage waiting for an industrial archaeologist to
ask me what it does.

BTW, having written the above, I have to confess one nagging concern
about the new version of XyNameHere: will it still be a *word*
processor?

Cheers to all,
John G.




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Dr J.L. Gordon
Department of Anthropology
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, WA 6907
AUSTRALIA

tel: +61 9 380 2850
fax: +61 9 380 1062

jgordon@xxxxxxxx
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