NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, October 2003
President's Column
by Dale Oliver, President
d_oliver@swbell.net
(click to email author)


Wow, I think Dr. Maxey deserves a prize for attempting to attach a world-record number of portable storage devices to a single laptop computer in front of a room full of computer club members. I suppose it was gratifying for some of us to see that even a veteran computer user like Ed can still struggle along with these confounding devices from time to time.

Although everything didn’t go exactly as planned with the projection system, we learned some valuable things nevertheless. For one, I was quite impressed with the PartitionMagic and DriveImage products. They did some pretty amazing things with casual aplomb. I thought PartitionMagic’s graphical depiction of partitions existing on all of the drives presented a very uncluttered, straightforward way of seeing everything at a glance. Backing up a hard drive partition using DriveImage was a piece of cake, too. Basically a drag-and-drop operation.

Another interesting thing Ed was going to show us, but wasn’t able to because of the projection problems, included using Norton Ghost to create a bootable CD-ROM disc. Boy, talk about a great way to bail yourself out of big trouble—a bootable CD-ROM would be the ticket. It’s good to know that Ghost will allow you to create bootable CD-ROM discs in addition to bootable diskettes. Ed tells us that Norton Ghost seems to be faster for small hard drive partitions up to 2 MB, but that PartitionMagic is faster for larger partitions.

Ed also pointed out that PartitionMagic 8.0 is aware of Linux partitions, and does not incorrectly report them as problematic partitions like previous versions of the software did. So if you plan to have Linux partitions on your hard drive(s), you might want to consider obtaining PartitionMagic 8.0.

We saw a USB2 external hard drive in use, and Ed reminded us that partition backups to external USB2 drives can be very useful, but it is important to remember that a running computer with an available USB port is required before such partitions can be written to an internal hard drive. We also saw a very clever way of hooking up a laptop computer’s internal hard drive using a neat little pouch so that it could be used as a tiny external drive. Cool idea! John Clark also brought one of his newest toys to show off, a 256 megabyte USB memory stick.

Thanks to a “heads up” by member Thornton Jacobs since the meeting, I was made aware of the fact that Symantec (makers of the Norton line of products) has signed an agreement to purchase PowerQuest (makers of DriveImage, PartitionMagic, DriveCopy, and other excellent software products we’ve grown to know and love). According to information released by Symantec, the transaction could go through sometime around the end of this year, pending regulatory approval. You can read more about it at this link: http://www.symantec.com/press/2003/n030923.html

In the meantime, if you’d like to snap up some PowerQuest products for a great price, remember to visit our friend Gene Barlow’s site for some great discounts. Instead of the $69.95 retail price per product, Gene offers them to club members for the discounted price of $39.00 apiece. Also, he offers some nice software bundles that include PartitionMagic, Drive Image, and two educational CDs entitled “Discovering Your Hard Drive” and “Backing up Your Hard Drive” for a bundled price of $99.00. What a great way to learn about hard drives and backing up data at your own pace! You will need our special club membership code of UGNL0402 to obtain these discounts.

Last month’s meeting concluded our thread of presentations relating to backing up data. This month we will have guest presenter John Gable from ABC Computer Company here to talk with us about PC maintenance and some things we can all do to keep our computers running more efficiently and reliably. Then in November we will have the ever-popular general Q & A session. See you at the meetings!

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