The PC corner - personal computers - Column

Business Economics, July, 1997 by John H. Qualls

Last quarter's column generated quite a bit of e-mail activity in response to my experiences with and recommendations concerning Windows 95. I also got some suggestions on how to solve my "Problem of the Quarter," a problem I was having with Excel. Many thanks to those who e-mailed. I have responded to each of you and, as you will see, have incorporated many of your ideas into this quarter's column.

Based on your input, I have revised my recommendation concerning waiting for Windows 97. A number of Windows 95 enhancement programs are available that overcome most of its shortcomings. In addition, the release of Windows 97 has been delayed and is not likely to come out until 1998. Given these facts, I see no reason to wait any further.

MICROSOFT PLUS! AND DRIVESPACE 3

The major reason that I changed my mind about waiting for Windows 97 is the availability of the Microsoft Plus! enhancement package for Windows 95. It contains DriveSpace 3, an enhanced version of DriveSpace, the Windows 95 version of the DOS DoubleSpace disk compression system. This alone is worth the $40 price of the package, because it gives you one of the most flexible and powerful disk compression systems around. It also eliminates the problem of wasted space that I talked about in last quarter's column. If you use DriveSpace 3, a one kilobyte file occupies only a maximum of one kilobyte, rather than the 16 kilobyte minimum on an uncompressed drive.

Initially, I was reluctant to try DriveSpace 3, because of the many shortcomings in the old DoubleSpace system that DOS 6.x uses. I have discussed these flaws in my previous columns, but a quick summary of them might be in order. They include: (1) the inability to use disk caching routines such as SmartDrive, which really slows disk access; (2) much slower disk defragmenting - over an hour to defrag a compacted disk vs. five minutes for the uncompacted version on my 486/50; and (3) only modest gains in disk space, around 80 percent more on my 486/50. These shortcomings sometimes make me wonder if it is worth the trouble of messing around with DoubleSpace.

In a nutshell, DriveSpace 3 takes care of all of DoubleSpace's deficiencies and adds several new features that make it worth the effort to install it. It does not appear to interfere at all with disk caching, which is built into Windows 95. Disk defragmentation goes as fast or even faster with compressed drives. Finally, I am realizing gains of 200 percent more useable space when using DriveSpace 3 on my Pentium 100 at work, which could effectively triple the useable space on my hard drive.

Rather than using DriveSpace 3 to compress my entire hard disk, I used the software to create another drive on my hard disk, the D: drive. This allows me to keep all of my Windows subdirectories on the uncompressed C: drive for maximum performance. Frankly, after seeing the excellent performance of the compressed files on the D: drive, I am about ready to go ahead and compress the C: drive also.

There is also a "compression agent" program included with DriveSpace 3. This program can be scheduled to work at specific times during the day (or once a week or month). It can run in the background to recompress the files on your compressed drive for maximum space saving. There are four levels of compression available - all the way from no compression up to "Ultra Pak," which can give you more than 3/1 compression.

You can fine-tune DriveSpace 3 to provide whatever balance of space saving versus read-write speed that you want. For instance, you might work with a lot of very large Excel spreadsheets, which you save quite frequently as you modify them. You would initially set up your compressed drive for minimal compression and move all of your Excel workbooks over to it. Then, you would schedule the compression agent to run (perhaps during lunch) to give you the maximum compression of these files.

When you subsequently worked with these files and saved them, they would initially be stored with minimal compression. However, the next time that the compression agent ran, it would recompress them to gain the maximum space savings.

All in all, DriveSpace 3 removes all of the drawbacks that plagued the old DoubleSpace program of DOS 6. x. It would be of particular interest to those of you who have been reluctant to move to Windows 95 but have limited capacity on your hard drives. A 300 meg uncompressed hard drive is a marginal candidate for conversion to Windows 95. However, you can use DriveSpace 3 and get more than 800 megs of useable space, which is plenty of room.

OTHER FEATURES OF MICROSOFT PLUS!

Microsoft Plus! includes a lot of other features, some very useful and some not. One of the most useful additional features is a "systems agent" that can schedule routine tasks to be run during off-hours on a regular basis. The compression agent is one of the programs that the systems agent schedules in this fashion. Other programs that can be scheduled are the Windows 95 disk defragmenter, the disk scanner program, and the backup utility. Actually, any program can be scheduled with the systems agent, making it a very powerful tool.