Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!sdsu!csun!srhqla!tcm
From: tcm@srhqla.SR.COM (Tim Meighan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Norton Utilities (WAS Re: Miniscribe 3085 on Dos3.3?)
Keywords: Norton, Reference
Message-ID: <1113@srhqla.SR.COM>
Date: 24 Jul 89 19:04:31 GMT
Reply-To: tcm@srhqla.UUCP (Tim Meighan)
Organization: Silent Radio, Los Angeles
Lines: 29

In article <[1063.5]comp.ibmpc;1@point.UUCP> wek@point.UUCP
(Bill Kuykendall) writes:

>[ For those of you about to flame me about the depth of Norton's
>capabilities, I suggest that A) you check out PCTOOLS and B) explain why
>Norton's new stuff works if the old approach was really necessary ]

I was really suprised when the buggy Utilities was released; if anything,
Norton is usually pretty conservative about such things.  Needless to say,
selling a disk utility that destroys data was a major screw-up.

Even though I think the Norton Utilities are a good package, I've never been
too impressed with Norton's reference books.  In his "Programmer's Reference
Guide," he has a tendency NOT to get into detail, but just kind of dismisses
things.  Example: he glosses over why TSRs can take up a few hundred bytes of
memory (even when the TSRs themselves are very small) by just saying that
DOS uses the space for "housekeeping."  Why not tell us that this memory is
allocated to the TSR environment space, that it is easily deallocated right
inside the TSR program with a DOS function call, and that most TSRs don't
even need to keep it?

The above might seem like nit-picking, but this book is touted (right on the
cover) as the ULTIMATE reference.  Well, an ULTIMATE reference should have
enough detailed coverage of the subject to back up the claim.

Tim Meighan
SilentRadio

"Oh yeah?  Well if you're so smart let's see YOU do it!"