45686,03,05/27/92,WARD CHRISTENSEN,RICHARD GOZDAL R/MS C, I've got some connections, so while I didn't get the offer, I got the SOFTWARE. Nearly got a hernia lifting the box! Even comes with 386^max, because I understand the environment needs a memory manager! 45687,10,05/27/92,WARD CHRISTENSEN,RICHARD HINTON R/MOTHER BOARD?, That's a pretty good price. You of course WILL double your perf, but it will make you want a faster/larger hard disk, etc. Go ahead and check what a 486/33 would cost, too! It will be double AGAIN the performance, and a few hundred spent now might be cheaper than spending more next year to go 486. They really HAVE come down in price. (But you're getting a steal - if memory is say $35/meg, that's $280 of your $530 just for memory - leaving $250 for the motherboard. Hmm. TOO cheap. No cache? (you're not halving the memory speed when you double the processor, so you need something else to make it faster - my 386/sx/25 has no cache, but has memory interleaving, which effectively is faster.) 45786,25,10/09/92,WARD CHRISTENSEN,ALL LAP/PALM SHOW, Spent most of two days at the Lap/Palm show in Chicago - Thurs & Fri. The most interesting box I saw was from Gateway - a 2.75# sub-notebook, with 400-line (double-scan CGA), 40M hard disk, (an ultra-thin 2.5"er) etc. $1295 direct. I've got details if you're interested. IBM showed off its new line of machines: all are called "Thinkpad", which is dumb, because that makes you think of the "pad" - i.e. pen based one. The 300 is a 5.9# monochrome machine, with 80 ($1375) or 120 ($1575) hard disk, 4M ram, ethernet ($125 (ea.) adapter cable for 10baseT or thinnet), and a REALLY NEAT "port replicator" which allows you to hang your cables off of the back of this 1.5" thick thingie - serial, parallel, power, VGA, mouse, keyboard - and quickly connect or disconnect all, with a simple motion. The 300 is a 386SL at 25mhz with 64K cache. The 700 line is the IBM 486SLC (a 16-bit I/O (bad) 16K cache (Good!) chip made by IBM based upon Intel licensing) running at 25MHz, with an upgrade available to the 25/50 chip. An 80M machine goes for $2700, and 120M for $2950 (if I'm recalling right). The 700C is a Beeeautiful 10.4 (largest in the industry, I think!) color active matrix 486SLC - goes for 4300 or so - anticipated street of $4k. The 700C was so agressively priced (this is with 3-year on-site warranty!) that other machines like the 300C just "fell out of the line". ---- Other interesting things - there are now several vendors of GPS hardware and software so if for example you're into sailing, you can tell exactly where you are at any time. Pretty slick. (Didn't get prices). 45787,10,10/10/92,ROY LIPSCOMB,ALL ALL COMMAND.COM'S IDENTICAL?, Is there only one identical edition of COMMAND.COM found in MS-DOS 5.0 (and PC-DOS 5.0), no matter which OEM distributes that DOS? Is the same true for DOS 3.1? 3.2? 3.3? 4.0? The reason I ask is that I've developed a utility that locates the errorlevel storage area in COMMAND.COM, retrieves that errorlevel, and then displays it. I've done this for my copies of COMMAND.COM for the above versions (except 4.0). Before releasing this utility, I'd like to be sure that it's universally usable. If anyone is interested in having this utility work for DOS 4.0 also, or for DR DOS, let me know. 45886,17,11/09/92,ALEX ZELL,ALL INTERNET ACCESS,NONO Direct accesss to the Internet is available to members of the various university communities, and is not generally available to "outsiders." The University of Chicago was rather generous about it for a long time, but recently closed access to all but a few outsiders. Even alumnii were not spared. Chinet, which sits on the same desk as this CBBS, offers indirect access in the form of news and email. (News is now received via satellite.) Direct access to Internet is available through other non-commercial as well as commercial providers. Unfortunately for Chicago residents, the nearest non-commercial providers I know of are Merit/MichNet and CICNet, both of Ann Arbor, Mich and Netillinois and CICNet, both in Urbana. I believe the least costly commercial provider with access via a phone number in downtown Chicago is Holonet, 46 Shattuck Sq., Berkeley,CAl. 94704. Voice: 510-704-0160; FAX: 510-704-8019. Email: info@holonet.net 45887,05,11/09/92,ANDY SHAPIRO,WARD/ALL DESKJET EXPERIENCES, OK, I'm about to buy a printer -- my 8 year old Oki'92 is at death's door. The DeskJet 500 looks good to me, and I kno Ward is a fan,\ SO: What should I know about before plunking $400 or so for it? I've heard that the beasty can be refilled with a syringe and fountain-pen ink, too -- is this true? 45986,11,12/30/92,WARD CHRISTENSEN,ANDY SHAPIRO R/DISK CLEANUP TIP, No, not using 4DOS - instead, CED. I don't want anything "too" different - I don't have those environments when on "other people's machines" etc. heh. I don't have a deskjet on my "main" machine, but actually I DID set up a little program to initialize the DeskJet - I put in all the normal fonts, densities, etc, that I use, and can cursor to one and hit space, it sends that setup. I wrote it in Pmate editor macors, and even saved it as a custom 28K version of Pmate called FS - Font Select. heh. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you have an EXCELLENT programmable editor like Pmate, everything looks like an "editor" solvable problem. 45987,09,12/30/92,WARD CHRISTENSEN,BILL MATTSON R/MODEM PROBLEMS, The only thing that comes to mind on the modem problems is that at times it seems to connect at the wrong speed. If I get a "connect 1200" then I just hang up and call back - I get 2400 that next time and everything works fine from there on out. It has to do with my having spent a lot of time customizing the answer sequences for an HST, but then having the HST die, and putting another (I think USR) 2400 modem on, which isn't a "perfect" match. If it were in my house, it would be easier to work on, but being in Chicago, it isn't. et, both of Ann Arbor, Mich and Netillinois and CICNet, both in Urbana.