ScuzzBlog: Diaries March 2017
Entry 21st March 2017: Post: 1
A1200 Heaven
Hi
Have moved an A1200 onto the desk behind me and the project
has just grown and grown. Hasn’t been without issue. First
up the HD floppy drive flipped out had to bring in another.
Next the keyboard space bar of all things was stuck. So
strange, kinda warped. Swapped out for another but failed
to see a note on the keyboard about a busted C key. Anyway
that got resolved. Next I started to transfer all my files
and just got so frustrated with the low capacity of the
drives so hooked up a Squirrel, second hard drive and ZIP
which helped a bundle. Finally started putting on my favourite
games. I have disk boxes labelled A to D, E to J, K to N etc
and load from my Alien Breed to Valhalla. Valhalla is cute
cus you simply copy the icons over and make the words ‘Valhalla
and the Lord of Infinity’. They did the same with Before the
War but not with the words of the game.
Having installed my favourite software like DPaint, ImageEngineer,
MainActor, VidiAmiga, PPaint, WordWorth, Softwood, AMOSPro,
DICE, Blitz, ProTracker, TechnoSound etc plus the multitide of
useful tools like IconCopy, Iconian, DiskSalv, ADFBlitzer,
DecrunchDface and on and on it was time to load up some of my
anims and images and stories etc.
Last thing I did was back up onto ZIP. Excluding the second
drive which has a lot of stuff on it this new A1200 has the
three volumes, partitions Work, Workbench and Projects. Having
spent the whole day building the volumes up to the way I like
them I was able to put the contents of all three onto two 100MB
ZIP disks. That includes the games and trust me 15 disks of
Beneath a Steel Sky isn’t a small game in Amiga terms. But now
I have everything locked way on a backup that I literally could
replace on the existing and still leave the machine running.
Could anything be more simple. And yet Winblows couldn’t even
get close to something that easy.
Did you know that back in the nineties I had Norton Utilities
on my Windows 95 machine and it had a ZIP utility that enabled
you to copy your Windows OS onto one 100mb ZIP disk. So if your
system crashed you simply reinstalled everything from the rescue
disk. Also a wonderful piece of software called Clean Sweep
would check your whole system and keep it squeaky clean. It
would track down and show you all your duplicate files, explain
what they were for and advise on whether you should delete them.
Norton’s tools let you disk manage on a very sensible platform
with Disk Doctor and Win Doctor. Sadly this all kind of vanished
after Win98 and by 2000 I was where I have always been with
Windows.. flying blind. All you have these days is the ‘Internet’
and forum blogs with comments and the Microsoft help which is
about as useful as SystemRestore. Sad really from the Amiga
where I can literally copy everything and replace if I got a
problem, to effective tools that managed your system to today
which basically means no help , just reinstall or go back in
time and keep your fingers crossed. MS have never been interested
in making an effective management tool that is idiot proof and
easy to use. They seem to believe that the OS should be a mystery,
inaccessible for the most part, convoluted to the extreme, and
almost impossible to repair without a masters degree in untying
very large balls of string. But then base a system around the
concept of ‘ The Registry ‘ and what do you expect.
Anyway.. time to shut down and go play on a real computer. Lucky me.
scuzz
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