1 Jan
2002
1 Jan
'02
4:59 a.m.
On Tue, 1 Jan 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote:
Why would anybody use PC-Tools-anything???? It's
dangerous even to have it
the car, let alone bringing it inside ...
Don't bring it anywhere near MY car!
Early versions seemed really neat.
It was great to be able to have half a dozen separate text editing windows
active. I installed it on the telephone/reception machine at my office.
I could keep the phone message log active (big file, kept as reference),
as well as process invoices, inquiries, and a few other tasks.
Then I started to get some disk errors. It would "saw" for a while, but
then it would continue without a message, therefore indicating [I assumed]
that it had finally found the sector that it was looking for.
But then one day I had to look up an old entry in the phone
log. AARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!! There were big chunks missing from the
file!!!!!
It turns out that PC-Tools was VERY concerned that the DOS critical error
handler ("Disk read error. Abort? Retry? Ignore?") would mess up their
pretty displays. So they had hooked the interrupt vector and set it to
always respond to any error with an "IGNORE"!!!!!!!)
KEEPING THE DISPLAYS PRETTY WAS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE DATA INTEGRITY!
I could not tolerate such treachery, and removed it.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com