Feedback from July 22

PartitionMagic

I have used PartitionMagic quite alot. I have made a couple of OS/2 boot floppies, primarily for restoring my Dualstor tapes. Since PartionMagic is so small, I copied pqmagict.exe to the Dualstor recover floppies. This allows me to resize format whatever I want to do before restoring my software. Any one using PartionMagic should probably make boot floppies for OS/2.

Roy Jackson


Response from PowerQuest to e-Zine! review.

I appreciate Sidney's review of PartitionMagic. On the whole, it is well researched, well written, and very complimentary of PowerQuest and PartitionMagic. But as you might expect, I take exception to her view that PartitionMagic's Presentation Manager executable is "completely useless." I regularly use PartitionMagic under Presentation Manager to change every partition on my drive.

Savvy OS/2 users know that there are a variety of tasks that can not be accomplished on the boot partition and so they have a maintenance partition. A maintenance partition is a small, secondary boot partition. The security afforded by a second bootable partition is very valuable. And equipped with Presentation Manager, a maintenance partition makes it possible to use any Presentation Manager utility on any partition. The trick is that the primary boot partition should contain no references to the maintenance partition and vice-versa. Kenneth Kahn's famous BOOTOS2 utility makes setting up a maintenance partition easy.

Prior to PartitionMagic, many OS/2 users wanted the use of a separate maintenance partition, but were stuck with one partition. PartitionMagic makes it easy to resize the primary boot partition smaller, and install Boot Manager and create a maintenance partition. Yes, the first time a one-partition user runs PartitionMagic they may be forced to boot OS/2 from floppy and run PartitionMagic's text-mode executable. Or they may boot DOS and run a DOS executable with the exact look and feel of Presentation Manager. Both solutions are quite acceptable, especially since they need only be stepping stones to a drive that is more efficient, more secure, and more organized.

Robert Raymond
Vice-President of Development
PowerQuest


- I agree that, "Savvy OS/2 users ... have a maintenance partition." This is definitely the best solution for PartitionMagic and just for general safety of your OS/2 system. However, when I said that the Presentation Manager version of PartitionMagic, "may be completely useless," (please note the "may be"), I was assuming that most home users of OS/2 do not have such a maintenance partition.

And you are right, the article was intended, overall, to be, "very complimentary of PowerQuest and ParitionMagic." They deserve it.

On another note, it has come to my attention that I did not very specifically mention that there IS an OS/2 alternative to the Presentation Manager version of PartitionMagic -- the OS/2 command line version shipped in the package. While I did obliquely mention this executable, I forgot that users who have not seen the program would not be aware of its existence. I apologize for that. All OS/2 users should know that even if they do have problems with locked files and the Presentation Manager version of PartitionMagic, the program is still invaluable (even if used from a command line) since it still performs exactly the same functions.

Sidney Maplehurst


Redial Scripts

I would be interested in trying the pppdial.cmd script you referred to in this month's OS/2 e-Zine! (Off-line Adventures). Could you e-mail me a copy, or let me know how to get one.

Fred Smith


- For all the readers who have asked this question, just point your browser to this link and get the full details.

The Win95 Revolution

I think that Microsoft's advertising campaign accomplished most of what it was intended to do. Most people that I interact with in the office and even in my own house are familiar the Windows logo and know hardly anything about OS/2 Warp. In fact, most people tend to support Windows 95 without even knowing what it is or what it does. Microsoft has captured the mindset of the public. It seems that nobody cared about "32-bit" computing until Microsoft began promoting its Windows software last summer. Although it seems that developers haven't completely migrated from 3.1 to 95, I think they eventually will because Windows 95 is in the mindset of the average consumer.

I think that OS/2 does have a bright future, however. Americans like to have choices in everything, including computer operating systems. OS/2 will fill this need perhaps better than any other OS. This is because OS/2 stays on the edge of cutting technology (VoiceType, Java intergration, etc.) and offers solid, reliable performance at a good price. As developers continue to create new, cutting edge applications for OS/2, consumers will be drawn to this fantastic operating system. I believe that OS/2 will continue to be the "leader" in terms of technological innovation for quite some time and will continue to grow in terms of market share.

Allan Bond


Regarding your column in OS/2 e-Zine about the Win 95 revolution:

The fundamental problem with your argument is that it is based on titles which were already being sold 2 months ago, so as to make it into the catalog you evaluated.

Much of the entertainment software development was waiting until DirectX was released, which only happened about 5 months ago. Given the lead time for software development, it is too soon to make the evaluation you made.

It is also unsurprising that you found it heavily weighted to DOS/WIN3.1 simply because your catalog listed several years worth of development for them, and less than 1 year for WIN95 (and less than 6 months for DirectX).

A better technique would be to survey announced upcoming titles. To take an example, the 8/96 issue of Computer Gaming World contains an extended article titled "Big Game Hunt" which is a preview of as many of the hottest upcoming games as they could find. (Strat Plus and PC Gamer did the same thing this month. I'm using the CGW article because they specifically list the target platforms. PC Gamer didn't bother, and Strat Plus simply listed any non-MAC-non-DOS game as "Windows", whether it was WIN16, WIN32s or WIN32/DirectX.)

Here's the count: Playable under OS/2: 35
Not playable under OS/2: 31

Steven C. Den Beste


Linfield's Line

Just finished your column in e-Zine!. I'm not a regular reader. In fact I came to the Web site to determine what this new Merlin thing was, and what it was all about.

Thanks to the first few editorials/columns I read I believe I have the answer to my question and after reading your column I had to give you a positve comment on what you wrote.

This is NOT the early 1980's. Back in those days one could get an entry-level computer for as little as $100.00 U.S. Now an "entry-level" system costs something like 17 or $1800.00 U.S. And these systems, as with all PC's, need periodic upgrading of hardware, which costs, to some, LARGE chunks of badly-needed money. My point? Merlin may be the greatest thing since the proverbial loaf of sliced bread, but you were absolutely right if your previous column pointed out that the hardware requirements might leave a majority of users behind.

I've been hearing people say the same line for years... "It's only a few hundred dollars." and one of my personal "barf bag hall-of-famers," "If poor people want to get into computers there are plenty of cast-off systems out there, selling at cheap prices."

This reasoning ignores some rather basic things. First of all not everyone who would like to, can afford to simply [spend] a major portion of their budget on toys, even cool ones that will run cool software. At times the money simply isn't there.

Cast-off systems? I don't know about you, but I haven't seen many ads in my local .forsale newsgroup advertising "cast-off" P133's w/ 48 Megs of RAM and Gig HD's. These people need to look in the yellow pages under "clue retailers."

I hope to one day be able to run WARP. And who knows? I *might* be getting a 486/66 w/ 16 Megs motherboard from a friend soon. *MIGHT*. But at my present income level (My cheapo net.access is due to my apology for a job) I won't be running Merlin anytime soon.

Just thought you'd like to have another "thumbs up" from yet another one of "the little people."

Dave

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