A Utilities Toolbox for PC-Minded Scientists

Editor's note: This is the first of three articles on utilities for personal computers that will appear over the next several issues. Part 2 will deal with DOS utilities and part 3 with desktop utilities. What are "free" programs and "shareware" programs? Free programs are exactly what they sound like: If you can get copies, they cost nothing. They are often called "public domain," which is a misnomer since most In fact are copyrighted. Shareware is often confused with free software. Its central premise is that because the choice of software is inherently a complex and a a personal matter, you should be able to try a program before you buy it. Some shareware programs, particularly the older ones use terms like "voluntary" and "contribution" when it comes to payment. More often, the author explicitly licenses you to use the software for a period of time, after which you are required to pay for it. To fail to do so is wrong-both morally and legally-as using a pirated copy of 1-2-3, although you are less likely to get caught A key element of shareware is that you are encouraged to make copies for others to try. When you register and pay your fee (often very modest), you usually receive the latest version of the program, news about updates, and sometimes even telephone support. Where can you get free programs? And how can you find shareware if you want to try it before you buy it? One source is friends. Free programs are, well, free and authors of shareware programs encourage you to copy them. Many universities maintain software libraries and some even have a bulletin board service. (BBS). A number of BBS allow you to download free programs or shareware if you have the proper communications software. Local BBS often are free or charge only a modest fee. National services have extensive collections. For example, the IBMNET of Compuserve (at half a million subscribers, the largest BBS service) has so much software that even the brief descriptions of it run to more than 2 megabytes! You can purchase Compuserve starter kits at many stores; connect time is $12.25 per hour. Numerous commercial disk services also sell disks containing free programs or shareware. Note that they sell only the service's time and the disks themselves-they do not register the software. One service with a reputation for keeping up to date is The Public (software) Library associated with the Houston PC Users Group. Disks cost $5 each plus $4 shipping and handling per order. A monthly newsletter is available for> $18 year. The address and telephone number are P.O. Box 35705, Houston, TX 77235; (713) 721-5205. -B.S. The IBM personal computer on your desktop can be an extremely useful device even if you only use a few large applications. But by adding the right software utilities, you can avoid a number of frustrations in dealing with your hardware and with the rather clunky interface that the disk operating system (DOS) provides. Knowing what kinds of utilities are available and what they do can help you make better use of your PC. First to consider are utilities that enhance the input/output (I/O) on your system-essentially your interface with the printer, disk, screen and keyboard. All the programs I mention are for IBM PCs and compatibles only. If I had to pick the single most important utility for everyday use, it would be a print spooler. It is ludicrous for anyone, let alone a busy scientist, to sit waiting for a slow printer to accept output from a program. A print spooler reserves some of your computer's memory and captures all the output in tended for the printer. Then, in the background, the spooler sends the output to the printer while you continue to use your PC. If you were to use many of the utilities I'll discuss here, you would quickly fill up your PC's 640K of conventional memory. If your PC is equipped with an extended memory specification (EMS) board, or if your IBM AT has extended memory, you should consider a spooler that places only a control program in conventional memory and places the data in the additional memory. (An EMS board is a way of giving your PC access to more than 640K by setting up a "window" in the area of memory that the computer can address and swapping different chunks of memory in and out of this window.) Since the spooler itself requires the computers attention, the actual time to print is somewhat longer than without the spooler. The spooler will slow down jobs that are so big they won't fit in the spooler. The spooler will fill and then send to the printer at a slower rate than if the spooler weren't there. Thus, you want a spooler large enough to accommodate your typical print jobs. For text output, a typical single-spaced page takes up about 3K of memory. But for graphics output, the amount of data is staggering-one page takes up roughly a megabyte of memory for a laser printer (300 dots by 300 dots by 11 inches by 8.5 inches divided by 8 dots per bytes) and about 150K even for a 9-pin dot matrix printer! Spoolers are of very limited value if you do a lot of graphics printing. If the graphics are controlled with postscript commands rather than a dot-by-dot description, the amount of data is much smaller and spoolers are again worth considering. (Postscript is a graphics control language for printers. Instead of sending complete dot patterns to the printer, you send commands to do operations such as drawing a line.) Most memory expansion boards come with spoolers. I especially like the spooler that comes with Quad-ram boards. There aren't, many commercial spoolers available. PRINTQ gives you enormous control over print jobs, but at too great a cost in the conventional RAM it uses and in the time you'll spend tinkering with the program. One of the cache programs I'll mention under disk speedup programs (SUPER PC KWIK) can be purchased with spoolers that share the cache memory. There is also a free program called MSPOOL2 that uses only conventional memory, but doesn't handle most graphics printing properly. But if you do only text- based printing, a 10K spooler can he quite useful. Keyboard macro programs allow you to reassign keystrokes either to other keys or to multiple strings of other keys. Moderns macro programs support key combinations like Ctrl-up arrow, which the computer doesnt normally support. They also allow you to record macros-that is, the macro program will note the keys as you type while in the application program. You can reuse them during the current session or save them to disk and use them another time. You can also define or redefine them using a special editor. Macro programs serve three overlapping but distinct purposes. First, you can re configure your software's command keys. For example, Ctrl-Left arrow may move the cursor one word to the left in your regular word processor and to the beginning of the line in your technical word processor. With a macro program you can make the command keys the same in both programs. Macros can also be used to create boilerplate-a word or block of text that you'll use more than once. For example, with a macro, you can use a single keystroke to answer the six questions your program insists on asking every time you want to print. I use a macro when I compose my Bitnet mail for later uploading to a VAX mainfame. A single keystroke adds my name in the middle of a new line, places a period in the first column of the next line to tell the VAX editor that the message is done, and answers several questions that I'm then asked. Finally, macros can be used to save keystrokes in doing temporary, repeated actions. For exampIe, I use a spreadsheet to grade students in my courses. When I enter the exam data in, say, five columns, I define a temporary macro so that when the last of the five pieces of data is entered, I hit one key to move the cursor down a row and over five columns. There are six or seven standard macro programs. The best selling is SUPERKEY. My favorites are KEYWORKS and the shareware program NEWKEY. There are a number of "fixes" to the default keyboard that comes with your PC. For example, the machine has a type-ahead buffer that allows you to type even though the program is ignoring the key board. (Say, the program is saving your file to disk and you want to continue writing.) However, this buffer holds only 15 characters. There are programs that allow you to increase that type-ahead buffer to 128 characters. The machine also comes with a typematic feature: if you hold down a key, it will repeat the character. This is especially useful for cursor keys. There is software that lets you speed up the rate with which the key repeats and adjust how long you need to hold the key down before the typematic action begins. I am used to speeding up my key board by a factor of about four; when I switch to another machine and hold down a cursor key, I feel like I'm swimming in molasses. Another problem is that application programs sometimes can't process keystrokes as fast as you can type them. This is especially true if you use an expanded key board-the type-ahead buffer might fill with typematic keystrokes. This "cursor run-on" can also be controlled by software. The simplest way to deal with the keyboard issues is a free program called KEFIX or KBFIX2. A popular commercial program is CRUISE CONTROL I recommend FANSI CONSOLE (discussed in the next section), if you can afford the memory. Note that KBFIX doesn't deal with cursor run-on, while CRUISE CON TROL doesn't expand the key board buffer. Scrolling on a screen is painfully slow, but there are utilities that can actually speed up scrolling by as much as a factor of six! Of course, scrolling that fast would be point less if you couldn't look at what has just scrolled off the screen. So, there are utilities for scroll recall. Finally, we all leave our machines unattended at times, risking burn- in-an afterimage permanently scarring the monitor. With screen-blanking utilities, you can instruct the machine to blank the screen after a certain amount of time. When you return, you restore the screen at the touch of a key. You'll also appreciate a screen blanker if you have sensitive data on your screen when someone walks in your office. To me the best set of screen/key board utilities is the shareware program FANSI CONSOLE. This program takes up a lot of memory (about 40K) and has a badly written manual, but it does offer all the enhancements I've mentioned. It also uses EMS for scroll recall and can blank both monitors on a dual-monitor system. BURNOUT is a free blanking program and NANSI is a free fast scrolling program which, like FANSI, replaces the ANLYS.SYS device driver that comes on your DOS disk. BACKSCRL is a primitive shareware (which seems to be free since the authors can't be found!) back scroller. The slowest way to access data is from a floppy disk. Hard disks are faster, but the fastest of all is to access data already in RAM. In fact, Access times for RAM are about 100,000 faster than fast hard disk times. Thus, it pays to use a disk cache-a utility that sets aside some memory (EMS or AT extended memory if you have it) to store the most recently accessed disk data on the principle that you're likely to use it again soon. Disk access times can also be de creased by cleaning up your disk files. When files are created or copied on a fresh disk, they are laid out in one contigious piece on your disk. But as you make files longer or erase them and then reuse the space, the files start being divided into many pieces, often spread around the disk. A disk defragger will defragment the disk and can substantially improve disk performance. EMMCACHE is a free program that supports EMS for caching. Two of the better commercial disk caching programs are super PC KWIk and VCACHE. It seems as if a new defragger is released each week. Two of the fastest are VOPT and FASTTRAX. The disk utility packages I'll discuss in part 2 also provide some of these services: The NORTON UTILITIES advanced version provides a defragger; PCTOOLS and MACE provide both a cache and a defragger. Simon is IBM Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech. His address is 112 Formosa Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90036.

A Utilities Toolbox for PC-Minded Scientists

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