You Asked Us-- PC: Heaps of Trouble
by Alan Zisman (c)
1998. First published
in Toronto Computes,
September
1998
Earl Gately asked:
I have a DX2-66mhz IBM clone. It had been
running with 8 megs, but I was having problems. I have since
upgraded to running 20 meg of
memory but I am still having the same problem.
After running a couple programs on Windows
3.1, I get a message that there is no resource memory available.
I had thought I solved this
problem once by adding Drivespace to the Autoexec.bat file, but now it
is
back and with a vengeance.
Alan Zisman replied:
System resources is a real limitation w. Win 3.x... It
was often commented on prior to the release of Win95-- but while it was
noted as a problem as
early as the Win 3.0-era, it was only marginally improved upgrading
from
Win 3.0 to 3.1 to WFWG 3.11.
Win 3.1 uses a number of memory heaps for user and
system resources-- icons,
fonts, and other resources are shared there. The size of these resource
heaps
cannot be increased by adding system RAM, hard-drive space/compression,
or
other methods... they are fixed at 64kb per heap. When these relatively
modest
heaps are full, you can no longer add resources.
As well, not only are those heaps of limited size, but
poorly written programs
sometimes fail to clear out the resources they used when you shut the
programs
down. As a result, you may have no options except to shut down Windows
and
restart.
Windows 95 significantly improved resource handling—if
this remains a
problem, seriously consider upgrading.
Wang (fswang@earthlink.net) wrote:
We are using a Mac network in the office. Can
I add one PC to
the network. Thanks
Alan Zisman responded:
Yes... the first question is whether your Macs are
networking using Ethernet
or the original, slower Appletalk networking.
If the cables connecting the machines have what looks
like an overgrown telephone plug on the end, then they're Ethernet--
you will need an Ethernet card in your PC-- these are common, easy to
find items-- I've had good success
with cheap clone cards; others may prefer brand name cards from 3Comm,
Intel,
or others.
If you're using AppleTalk, you'll need to get an
AppleTalk card for your
PC-- these are available, but are harder to find.
For software, to connect a PC to an existing Mac
network, I'd recommend PC-MacLan. There are different versions for
Win95, WinNT, etc... but there's a free trial version available. Check
with Miramar Systems for more information: www.miramarsys.com/ (By the
way, if you need to do the opposite, connect a
single Mac to a TCP/IP-based Win95/NT network, check out ‘Dave’
software for
the Mac from www.thrusby.com).
Johnson Ng pondered:
How do I save a *.mid and *.wav from the Internet
to my hard-drive with
IE 3.02 and Netscape Communicator 4.04?
In both Netscape Navigator and IE, right-click on the
link to the WAV or
MID file...
In both cases, a menu will pop up.
In Netscape, choose: Save Link As...
In Internet Explorer choose: Save Target As...
James Reed queried:
Is it possible to "catch" a virus from the Internet
by just "clicking" on a site and reading the contents, but not
downloading? The reason I don't download, I don't know how and
have not found anything that I wish to download - yet.
Viewing an Internet page is GENERALLY safe... I say
'generally' because there is the possibility that Java or ActiveX
applets on the page could damage
your system behind the scenes.
This is theoretically possible, but doesn't seem to
actually be happening 'in the wild', but a commercial product,
Cybermedia's Guard Dog, has been released, promising to guard against
this, and other Internet dangers.
? for more information on this program, check out www.cybermedia.com
When you do find something you want to download, it’s
generally quite easy—typically
web pages will have a link to click on, or a button saying Download. If
the
file is compressed, you will need to get a program to uncompress it
before
you use it—shareware programs like Winzip for PCs or Stuffit Extractor
for
Macs are quite popular and easy to use.
BMA wondered:
Help! I made a zip file on 12 disks which contains
a lot of small family
picture files. My last zip disk is damaged, actually I am shocked to
find
out the last zip disk is blank. When I attempt to unzip this file,
it always ask for the last zip disk which I don't have
as I mentioned early.
I tried pkfix for the 11th disk but no luck. Is there any way to
recover
these picture files from the first 11 disks? Please help.
As far as I'm aware, you're out of luck-- if any of
the floppy disks in
a multi-disk ZIP file are damaged, the whole archive is unusable.
And as you've had the bad luck to discover, floppy
disks are unreliable enough that out of a dozen, it's easy to get a bad
one... and PKZIP doesn't give you any warning of that, until you try to
open it.
Some people who do this a lot prefer the ARJ
compression program-- while less popular than ZIP, it gives better
compression rates, and at least is
clever enough to comment if a diskette doesn't work when creating a
multi-disk
archive.
If you keep on using multi-disk zip archives, be sure
to test them out by unzipping them before you delete the original
files!