square bullets

I read somewhere that Windows recovery code (all stuff it does while it's booting up, and subsequent boot attempts if it fails to start) is really top-notch, since they have so many disasters to test recovery from. 2000 really isn't that bad-- good thing they've come up with stuff that won't run under 2K so they can keep the revenue coming in.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Or Ultraedit. I have a cute little clipboard utility on my office computer (can't recall the name atm) that lets you select whether you want to paste plain or with the other junk in there (as well as giving you a stack of items and letting you view them).. Copying from web pages (something I have to do fairly regularly to grab names and addresses) does not always seem to be consistent. It would be nice if they'd dedicated another hotkey to make the distinction clear.

Wordperfect had it right AFAIC with their 'view codes' command. Easy to see all those hidden format commands in one swell foop.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Hello John,

As others have said before try Open Office. I just did. The word processor is quite bloated and I can't say much about its behavior yet. But I prepared a presentation using its "Impress" part, kind of like Power Point. This was much more stable than Power Point, didn't crash once.

One reason why I currently stick with Word is the preview feature before opening a file. Very handy. However, I have learned the hard way by experiences just like yours to write documents very plainly and only at the end do the "fancifying". Then it'll crash a lot but at least I have the core text saved. I do this last bit of work in a file that is temporarily saved as "temp.doc". When that gets corrupted, oh well. Only when completely done will it be saved via my file numbering system.

BTW I finished a project and thus a document for a client an hour ago. Just as I inserted a schematic things became like molasses and a gray box popped up "Word has generated errors and will be....". Oh man. Luckily it took out just that temp file. Lost about 5 minutes of work.

Regards, Joerg

My old laptop (ThinkPad A21p) with Win2K crashed maybe five times in as many years. ITs replacement (ThinkPad T42p crashes pretty much once a week, despite being five years newer and having 4x the memory.

Come on! It sucks. My DOSish calculators usually are "out of resources". That *NEVER* happened under Win2K. XP sucks, though I guess I have to live with it (and will be buying a personal laptop with it this week, gack).

Win2K has been the *ONLY* version of Windows that could remotely be referred to as being "stable".

I have a Thinkpad A22P running win 2K - essentially the same model with a 1 GHz PIII CPU - and I don't want to upgrade to a new model it as it works fine. Very Stable. The only time it crashes is when I do something stupid, run known very buggy software, or fill the Virtual Memory and RAM so full it crashes. I think I may spend a few $ on it soon and slap a larger HD, some more RAM and replace the battery cells with 2400 mAh ones - that should keep me going for several more years. The 1600 - 1200 screens on those models are great, but getting slow by today's standards.

gack).

Totally agreed. I will only run it now. If you have an XP license, you are allowed to run win 2K instead, as apparently noted in the EULA. I'm soon going to try out eComStation - looks promising, at least for 90% of the programs I run.

All my old DOS stuff seems to work... my inventory control/parts list system (now networked to the server), assemblers, APEEL, the DOS PowerBasic environment and compiler, and my various compiled DOS apps, graphics and all. And it still runs my favorite PC program of all time, Tim Stouse's File Manager.

John

I work mostly with EDIT.COM, actually a nice little text editor. But this is an official "proposed product" datasheet, to be circulated to prospective customers for comment, so it has to look sorta glitzy. Of course, we'll convert it send it to them as a pdf, since some customers won't allow Word files over email at all, and my best customer is all Linux and gets annoyed and makes rude comments about us if we send them .docs.

I guess I could learn Pagemaker. Even Open Office is still the Word paradigm, which is crap. I mean, if I want to move text, why can't I just draw a box around and drag it, like 99% of the programs in the world allow?

John

Mine was taken away from me, but not before I could hold out for another reasonable model (gave up 1600x1200/512MB/850MHz for

I don't think I am on that system (corporate image), though this is good to know since I'm planning on buying a personal laptop this week. Is there a good place to find a Win2K image? The only place I find that XP is superrior is in the graphics (dual-head without a seperate graphics card).

Looking to make your bullet points look like bullet holes? :)

Maybe you could print it, then scan and OCR it. :)

Consider Adobe Indesign (a bit pricey but available in bundled versions with other heavyweight Adobe stuff). It's truly the feline hindquarters. Considering the capabilities, relatively easy to use, compared to competitors such as Quirk Xpress.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Try Openoffice.org (otherwise known as OOo).

It craps all over office. And its free. Yes.

Office craps all over Office. And enjoys it. Just wait until the mind of Bill Gates is included in its entirety into 'Clippy' in the 100G Office XX. It already watches over your shoulder and makes smart-ass comments.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I'm running eCS 1.2 annd will go to 2.0 soon when it goes GA. I ran OS/2 warp 4 from '97 until early last year when I went to eCS. My machine is a ThinkPad T23.

I am very happy with eCS. I have several oldie but goodie DOS apps which run better on this system than they ever ran under DOS. I have kept but shrunk the W2K that came with the machine and still have about four apps that I haven't replaced with native eCS-OS/2 apps mainly because of laziness. The next project in that line will be to see if I can get Garmin MapSource to run under Odin or Svista.

Ted

I don't use Word but when I run into weird character problems I cut and paste into the APL2 editor. Everything is a byte and all 256 are available. It's a one-liner to toss everything that isn't on a list of "acceptable" characters.

Ted

Something I've found handy: I have set up a second "printer". It's a top-of-the-line PostScript printer that I don't have but I've set it up to print to file. I can print from pretty much anywhere to this printer then convert to .PDF with Ghost Script.

Ted

Me too. There was an episode on MythBusters (Science Channel / On Demand) where they made a penny shooter - a modified "silencer" attached to a rifle. They put the penny in the modified "silencer", and put a "blank" in the rifle to propel the penny to, oh, Mach 2 or something.

They wanted to see if you threw a penny of the Empire State, how much damage it would do...

Funny!

Clippy could definately tip you over the edge if you were unsure.

You aren't using environment variables in batch files for any of those. I've written some very large batch files that do some quite complex stuff.

Turbo C 2.01 and Turbo Pascal 6 run fine under both 2k and XP, even in graphics mode.

- YD.