------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTERVIEW WITH ????? | Weekly Interviews with the Movers and Shakers! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Our interviews return next week! Here are some other thoughts on WordPro . . . Time for me to say something about this about this Ami Pro/MS Word/Word Pro situation.... (warning: this could be a bit long ) I have been agonizing the last little while as to what to do. It's been clear to me that Ami Pro is just far too out dated for my needs. It doesn't have features I really could use (such as font embedding). But where do I go? I'm a person who has a PASSIONATE and INTIMATE relationship (!!!) with my word processors. It absolutely breaks my heart to leave old ones behind. We have shared so many WORDS together! And Ami Pro is the most loved and favorite word processor of any i've had. I absolutely love it to pieces. The interface design, the way it feels (fluid! Flexible!).... and on and on. Where do I go? Well i have to admit, out of desperation, i've got Word 7.0 on my system now. I've been working with it for several days. Converting documents mostly-- becoming familiar with with Word "way" of doing things. It has some nice features, to be sure... um, but really, it stinks! I may be biased, but Ami Pro is a far better product. So much more intuitive. Does things so much faster. Some of my more obvious favorite things about ami pro simply don't exist in it (in spite of their best efforts to rape old ami pro functions and incorporate them). I happen to like ami pro's shaded margins! I like having several clean screen options. And I like peppering my documents i'm working on with pop up notes! How can i live without that? And the list of things goes on and on. I've been trying SO hard to like Word 7.0... i don't think anyone has ever tried harder to like any software! Because I need to upgrade. But the most I can achieve is low grade bitterness at my loss of Ami Pro, and numb resignation to the seemingly inevitable. Especially in light of this Word Pro fiasco. But guess what... You people here have poisoned me against Word Pro! The denunciations of it are so pervasive and vehement and overwhelming I really thought it was a forgone conclusion that it's completely different than Ami Pro, and for the most part ... unworthy. But just yesterday i finally got a chance to see it for myself. I didn't have too long to play with it a few hours. And i was SKEPTICAL because of all I read here. But you know what? IT'S NOT THAT BAD!! I ------------------------------------------------------------------------ VIRUS WATCH: ANTICMOS by Tony Brooks I guess that one of the scariest viruses I can imagine is one that messes around with CMOS information. The reason behind my fear lies in the probability of correctly diagnosing the problem. A computer tech can spend hours trying to figure out why your CMOS settings seem to be erased from memory. Another problem, is that some techs may suggest that the ROM (Read Only Memory) is at fault, while all along, all it is, is a little, nasty virus! The ANTICMOS virus does exactly what I have described above. ANTICMOS may be spread under the alias LENART, as well as its real name, ANTICMOS. ANTICMOS is a memory resident, boot and partition sector virus. This virus can infect and effect both floppy and hard disks. Hard disks are infected when booted from an infected floppy system disk. The floppy disks are infected during read or write access. Read or write access operations include the DOS DIR and COPY commands. Once the hard disk has been infected, the virus overwrites boot and / or partition sector information. This can also happen to an disinfected floppy disk, however, the chances are 1 in 256. Getting back to the hard disk, once the virus triggers it will patch CMOS data. Then the problems really begin. Expect messages such as "Hard Disk C: not installed". The type of a floppy drive is changed, as illustrated below: If it was 5.25" 360Kb, it becomes 3.5" 720Kb; If it was 5.25" 1.2Mb, it becomes "not installed"; If it was 3.5" 720Kb, it becomes 5.25" 360Kb; If it was 3.5" 1.44Mb, it becomes 5.25" 1.2Mb; and if it was "not installed", it becomes 5.25" 1.2Mb. Once this has happened, on the next boot of the system, BIOS should display the CMOS CHECKSUM FAILURE error message. This is because the virus does not bother to recalculate CMOS checksum. Removal is possible. Most up to date virus scanners such as McAfee, F-Prot and Dr. Solomon will find, correctly identify and eradicate the virus with little or no permanent damage, other than the frustration of the virus to begin with. There are some symptoms which may lead you to believe you have the Virus ANTICMOS, or other such virus which affects your CMOS, which are in fact symptoms of something else. If you believe you have a virus in your CMOS, but Virus Scanners can't find it, consider these other possibilities: 1. BAD BIOS CHIP - Sometimes the BIOS Chip goes bad and doesn't retain data. This can be a nightmare to troubleshoot, so if your BIOS chip is bad, call up the BIOS manufacturer and get a replacement chip. Make sure you get the serial number from your old chip so a perfect match can be found for your mother board. 2. CORRUPTED FLASH BIOS - If your mother board uses a Flash-BIOS; ie, a BIOS that can be upgraded through software, then get in contact with your BIOS manufacturer and order the software upgrade. (Upgrading the Flash-BIOS might require jumper and dip switch changes, so have your mother board documentation handy.) 3. MOTHERBOARD - Not much needs to be said here, get a new motherboard. That's not as bad as it sounds. For under $200 you can pick up a 486 motherboard, chip and all. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ INTERVIEW WITH ????? | Weekly Interviews with the Movers and Shakers! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This week we interview Marc Perkel from Computer Tyme in Springfield, MO. If you are a NetWare administrator you are probably using a utility developed by Marc. Check your little .EXEs and .COMs . . . Mark spends his time coding and working on the Nerd Movement . . . PG: Computer Tyme is known to any NetWare network administrator. For those asleep at the wheel, what does your company do and what are some of the more popular programs? MP: Computer Tyme develops software utilities for managers of large networks. Our customer is the person in the back room that keeps the networks running. We developed MarxMenu and the Network Survival Kit. I've also licensed my INI file manager to McAfee which they bundle with Net Tools under the name IniTool. PG: What do you think of Novell's current direction in the NOS market? MP: I think that Novell is probably 4 years ahead of Microsoft in network operating systems. NT doesn't have near the power to handle the loads of large networks in the real world. However, I see Novell as a company who is standing still. They seem to have lost the "Vision Thing". PG: What do you think technically of Windows NT? MP: I don't have a lot of technical knowledge of NT except the the user interface of 3.51 is a big step backwards from Windows 95. I'm waiting for NT 4.0 before I get excited about NT. PG: Will you be moving your products to a GUI any time soon? MP: My products won't move to a GUI interface. There are some things that are done only as script languages in batch processes and that's my market. However, I have Delphi and I have some ideas I'm exploring. PG: What do you do for fun when your away from Computer Tyme? MP: I write an electronic publication called "Thinking Magazine" that's available on my web server. I'm very politically active. I'm a member of both the Democratic and Republican parties. I'm the Supreme Commander of the Nerd Liberation Movement. We're "Coming out of the Back Room". And I do a little farming on the side. PG: What is the next hot item in the networking field? MP: The Web is the hottest thing on the planet right now. Integrating your network into the web is very hot. PG: What do you like best about Springfield, MO? MP: Springfield is a small quiet midwest town who's main exports are cattle, pot, and religion. A generally mello place to live. When Nixon talked about the "Silent Majority" he was thinking about Springfield. It's the biggest "small town" in America. PG: What do you like least about Springfield, MO? MP: It's to mellow. It's a midwest monoculture. We have both kinds of music, Country and Western. We're down a dirt road on the "Information Highway". I can fly directly only to Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Nashville and Dallas. PG: What is the configuration of your personal workstation? MP: I'm running a Pentium 120 with a 1 gig drive and 24 megs ram using Windows 95. I'm connected to a Novell 4.1 server with 4 gigs hard disk space. I have 3 BBS/Fax Servers, email transport, and a Linux web server on the backbone. I'm connected to the internet with an ISDN 128k link. PG: What is the coolest piece of software you have encountered in the last month? MP: Netscape Gold 2.01. þ