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
<http://www.segasoft.com>

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 doesnt 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-Its 
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 Nortons Recycle bin protection 
turned on, and Partition-It would not let me delete the partition. 
Turning off Nortons 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

Ill 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 Burns 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. Broderbunds 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 Broderbunds 
World Family Tree project. If that wasnt 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 grandmothers preferred middle 
name (Rose). You can also insert personal stories describing incidents 
or events in the persons life. 

But Family Tree Maker doesnt 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-grandfathers 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 doesnt 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 CDs 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 youve 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: <http://www.geocities.com/~compunotes>
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





