Author Archive

Dan Pacheco

Digital Government

SuperDisk drive can handle regular, 120M floppies

Pros and cons: + Backward compatibility with standard floppies – Slow startup, occasional lockup Real-life requirements: Win9x, 8M RAM, 5M free on hard drive, free parallel port Trying to get by with 1.44M floppy disks nowadays is like trying to pack a lunch in a coin purse. There's just not enough room.

  • By Dan Pacheco, GCN
Digital Government

Quarterdeck's CleanSweep 4.0 excels at purging Net caches

CleanSweep 4.0 diligently catalogs your data clutter, empties your trash cans, alphabetizes your CD-ROMs and presents a laundry list of things needing repair. If you didn't buy its predecessors, check out this version. The Quarterdeck Corp. utility for Microsoft Windows 95 has resident programs called Smart Sweep and Internet Sweep that comb your hard drive for residual files left behind after deleting programs manually or via Win95's imperfect Add/Remove Programs.

  • By Dan Pacheco, GCN
Digital Government

PC MacLAN unites the two big-name OSes

Microsoft Corp. may have defeated Apple Computer Inc. in the war for the business desktop, but there are refugees on both sides. All-Macintosh offices go into painful contortions when they add PCs to their mix, and vice versa. The neglected issue of cross-platform networking has become critical. Last fall, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple's Steve Jobs finally promised to bring their operating systems closer together, but someone beat them to the punch.

  • By Dan Pacheco, GCN
Digital Government

You must have statistical smarts to get the most from Analytica

Given a good palette and brush, a skilled artist paints a masterpiece. The same tools can produce a mess in the hands of an amateur. That pretty much sums up Analytica, a visual modeling tool whose mathematical gloss can be dimmed by the user's ignorance of statistical theory. The program relies on flowcharts to map every factor that goes into making a decision. For example, an analysis on the value of enforcing a seat belt

  • By Dan Pacheco, GCN