Mary Sheridan started at 6:00 with the Windows SIG discussion. This is turning into a very valuable session, with a lot of people contributing and some real problems being discussed, and hopefully some useful answers. We only have a half hour for this, until 6:30, so if you want to get in on this, bring your PC problem with you, or just join in with your own opinions. I have a great time myself.

For about 20 minutes, we discussed the club business, SIG group activity and introductions. We passed around the SIG signup sheets and announced a combined Internet/Genealogy SIG meeting for September.

Our guests from Quarterdeck arrived promptly at 6:45, and we were able to turn the floor over to Tom Rivers, Shawn Rivers and Keith Pisano from Quarterdeck. They discussed some of their many products, CleanSweep Uninstaller, Partition-It, Disk Clone Extra Strength and, to some extent, Procomm Plus.

Partition-It is a hard drive utility that enables you to re-size your hard disk partitions. It can create, combine and delete partitions. It can also convert a FAT partition to FAT32. It has an installable boot manager that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run, and sets the partitions necessary to keep those operating systems separate.

DiskClone is both a hard drive copier and a backup utility. As a disk copier, it will "clone" a hard drive, duplicating it exactly to another physically different hard drive. This is necessary when you are replacing your hard drive (and before your old one crashes), a fairly common occurrence with hard drive prices so low. There is no other way to do this except with a utility of this sort. DiskClone will also make a compressed copy of a disk partition to a file, to be kept and used for recovery. This is a very fast way to back up the drive. The only difficulty with this is that you need a place for the file, which is about half the size of all the files on your hard drive. So you need a ZIP, SPARQ, LS120, a CD writeable or a second hard drive with enough capacity to write to directly. The software will split up the file for purposes of backing up to these media, as long as the backup device will work in DOS. The recovery of this file is dead simple, fast and accurate, without installing any Windows software.

Cleansweep uninstaller is used in several ways. One very important mode (to me) is that it can be set to run in the background to monitor any software installation, keep the information in a database and use that information to restore your machine back to the condition before the installation. Even if you install subsequent software that uses some of those files, it tracks that too, so that an uninstall will not also break other programs. It does various other things too, like eliminating duplicate DLL’s.

Quarterdeck gave us a very interesting talk; they inspired a lot of questions from the membership, and I think they had a good time too. Thanks to Quarterdeck and to Tom, Shawn and Keith.

The Doorprize drawing was very intense, understandable considering the value of the software. We were able to give away copies of CleanSweep, DiskClone, Partition-It and Procomm Plus. u