The Last Word                                 A WindoWatch Feature


                     Quality Control?  What's that?
                     Copyright 1995 by Ben M. Schorr

 Last week I found a great deal on a tape drive; a Teac 70 and bought it
 at a superstore for $99.  It was bundled with Arcada backup software
 for  DOS and Windows delivered with all the necessary brackets and
 screws.  When I got the drive to the office it installed quickly and
 with ease. In truth, the backup software setup was even easier than
 that of the tape drive.

 Smiling to myself I slid in a pre-formatted tape and fired up the
 software to do a full backup. Drives D: E: & F:  I said - "and away it
 went" and left to run some errands. When I returned an hour or so later
 the backup was just finishing up. - "Perfect timing!" I thought. When
 the software finished, I decided I'd better go through the formality
 and do a compare as this was a new backup with crucial data!

 Much to my surprise, upon starting the compare, the software demanded
 Tape #1 of the set. Well... there was only one tape and it was already
 in the drive. CONTINUE I pressed. "Insert Tape #1" it requested again.
 Now I was a bit confused and I reinserted the tape and pressed
 CONTINUE. Again, the "Insert Tape #1" message.  I escaped out of that
 procedure and went to IDENTIFY which would give me the tape status.

 Much to my shock, IDENTIFY,  after much buzzing  and clicking, reported
 that the tape was blank!  So I tried a smaller backup and compare. Once
 again, after twenty minutes of backing up with no apparent errors,
 IDENTIFY told me  that the tape was blank and COMPARE insisted that it
 was the wrong tape. I tried a different tape... and again, the same
 result.

 A subsequent phone call to Arcada yielded a support person who knew a
 surprising amount about my problem already and then revealed that she
 had already received two calls just like this! She promised to have an
 engineer call me back in one to three days when they'd decided what to
 do.

 Four days later, with no returned call , I called them back. A
 different support person theorized that the problem was a conflict with
 the firmware in the tape drive and suggested that I call TEAC to have
 the drive replaced.   My great deal wasn't looking so great anymore.

 This particular software was written for this specific drive and was
 bundled with the drive when I bought it.  Doesn't anybody test this
 stuff anymore?

     Of Windows 95, Windows NT and other graphical thoughts...

 I spent five hours last night listening to Microsoft people tell us how
 wonderful Windows NT Advanced Server is and heard them downplay Windows
 95 - except as an NT Client!  They emphasized built-in Web serving,
 remote access,  connectivity, scalability and how it matches up, in
 terms of market share, with Netware.

 Sadly, most of these vendor dog and pony shows are spent convincing us
 how many other VARs are selling their product and not enough time is
 spent convincing us WHY we should sell their product and how to work
 with it once we've installed it.

 Interestingly, the Microsoft people seemed very excited about being
 able to dial into an NT server with RAS and add a new user account from
 a remote PC. Pardon my tepid response, but that's exactly what I've
 been doing with LANtastic servers for the last 2 years. Am I really
 supposed to get excited about a feature that has been in a smaller and
 cheaper peer to peer network product for a long time?

 A couple of features that were kind of neat, is the ability to easily
 access your Netware servers from NT and the ability to control many
 parts of an NT server from SYSCON - for you Netware fans.

 Otherwise it was the usual marketing show, with a nice dinner and a
 free copy of NT Advanced Server (a $699 value, according to the
 brochure) for each company in attendance.


                    A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind

 I finally took the leap and cleaned all of those papers off my desk.
 Some were important. Some were overdue. Some were ads. None were
 checks.  Isn't that just the way life is? While I was busy cleaning my
 desk, some  of my clients were busy cluttering their Windows Desktops.

 It's amazing, but I saw a machine this week that had something like
 seventeen open groups at one time. Each of them windowed to the size of
 a postage  stamp so that you could barely see a single icon in the
 group and it was usually a README icon. Is this what the creators of
 GUI interfaces really envisioned for us?

 I tried to resist, but finally gave in and took that user by the arm
 and gave her a fifteen minute lesson on how to clean up the desktop.
 It turns out that the only group where the applications she actually
 uses was one of the only groups that wasn't open!  We spent some time
 learning about minimizing and maximizing. We grabbed blue title bars,
 dragged and dropped, closed groups and even deleted some entirely. We
 tiled and cascaded until we practically heard angels singing! When all
 was said and done we pressed SHIFT-ALT-F4 (Ben's Tip of the Month,
 folks) to save our new, clean, productive desktop and I triumphantly
 whooshed out of the room and on with my day.

 An hour later I strolled past the door and peeked in to see her
 gleefully winning a game of Solitaire.  So much for productivity.

 If you've got a neat trick to enhance productivity, -other than
 deleting Solitaire, E-Mail it to me at ben.schorr@bcsbbs.com

 Ben Schorr is the Host of the Ilink Consultants conference and the
 Director of Operations of Watson/Schorr Consulting of Canoga Park, CA .
 He is a regular contributor to WindoWatch.


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