Category : Files from Magazines
Archive   : PCMAG191.ZIP
Filename : UTIL.LOG

Utilities and articles log for PC Magazine issues from 1984
thru 15 Jan 1991. All are widely used and tested, and available from
the PC MagNet at no cost other than CompuServe connect charges.

To download from Compuserve at ! prompt type GO PCMAG
then GO UTILITIES


Program: BIGMEM, BOOTMEM
Author: McManigal
Title: The First Heartbeat
Vol. 3 No. 6

Program: none
Author: Smith
Title: Driving with ANSI.SYS
Vol. 3 No. 7

Program: none
Author: Smith
Title: Metastring Magic
Vol. 3 No. 8

Program: none
Author: Sheldon
Title: Building an Orderly Hard Disk
Vol. 3 No. 9

Program: DEMOPLOT
Author: Herkommer
Title: A PC Pen Plotter
Vol. 3 No. 10

Program: none
Author: Weinberg
Title: Debugging Bad Habits
Vol. 3 No. 11

Program: MENU, TIMESET
Author: Stitt
Title: What's on the Menu?
Vol. 3 No. 12

Program: CLEANUP
Author: Holzner
Title: Operation Cleanup
Vol. 3 No. 13

Program: none
Author: Weissman
Title: Enhancing PC-DOS
Vol. 3 No. 14

Program: subroutine to add to COMMAND.COM
Author: Weissman
Title: Get SET for Speed
Vol. 3 No. 15

Program: DBFIX.BAS and program to generate free-form report without column headings
Author: Olympia
Title: Tips on dBASE II
Vol. 3 No. 16

Program: DDT patch, DB2MM.PRG
Author: Olympia
Title: Writing in dBASE II
Vol. 3 No. 17

Program: sample program
Author: Thacker
Title: BASIC Labeling
Vol. 3 No. 18

Program: input subroutine routine program with two expanded versions
Author: Cuellar
Title: Controlling User Input
Vol. 3 No. 19

Program: CRLF.COM, TESTCRLF.DAT, MARKEOF.COM
Author: Abrash and Illowsky
Title: Designing DOS Filters
Vol. 3 No. 20

Program: MARKEOF, CR/LF
Author: Abrash and Illowsky
Title: Custom-Made DOS Filters
Vol. 3 No. 21

Program: KOCH.BAS
Author: Estvanik
Title: Fractals and the IBM PC
Vol. 3 No. 22

Program: BARS.BAS, CONVERGE.BAS, MLTIBRST.BAS, TWOLINE.BAS, COMPCOLR.BAS, ANIMATE.BAS, CHARSHOW.BAS, INTLCVID.BAS, BENTTEXT.BAS, CHARDEFN.BAS, SCRNMOVE.BAS
Author: Powell
Title: Using IBM's Color Adapter
Vol. 3 No. 24

Program: NPAD
Author: Holzner
Title: PC Notepad Made Easy
Vol. 3 No. 25

Program: none
Author: Abel
Title: Keyboard Codes
Vol. 4 No. 1

Program: PARINT
Author: Hunter
Title: Parity Insurance
Purpose: Logs the time of "Parity Check" errors on printer (or screen if printer isn't ready), disables all parity checking and returns control to user.
Vol. 4 No. 2

Program: DOORS
Author: Dickinson
Title: Try a Door, Not a Window
Purpose: permits switching between two simultaneously connected displays without leaving an application program and thereby losing the contents of the alternate screen.
Vol. 4 No. 3

Program: RED
Author: Dickinson
Title: REDirecting Your Files
Purpose: transfers one or more files from one subdirectory to another without requiring the use of COPY or ERASE
Vol. 4 No. 4

Program: PW.BAS, ANSWER.BAT, GOODBYE.BAT, BYE.BAS, MOVIT.BAS
Author: Manes
Title: Control Your PC from Anywhere with CTTY
Vol. 4 No. 5

Program: MOVE
Author: Holzner
Title: Copying Files Selectively
Purpose: allows rapid selection and copying of files to or from a double-sided floppy disk, a RAMdisk, or the current subdirectory of a hard disk.
Vol. 4 No. 6

Program: UNDEL
Author: Holzner
Title: Recovering Lost Files
Purpose: recovers files on double-sided floppy disks that have been accidentally deleted.
Vol. 4 No. 7

Program: PR
Author: Dickinson
Title: Printing Program Files
Purpose: prints the standard ASCII files of program listings according to a standard formatted style
Vol. 4 No. 8

Program: ONEKEY
Author: Holzner
Title: Making Your Own Macros
Purpose: reassigns a designated series of keystrokes to a user-selected keystroke.
Vol. 4 No. 9

Program: LOCATE
Author: Holzner
Title: Finding Anything Anywhere
Purpose: searches all files in the current and the root directories of a drive for all occurrences of any specified sequence (e.g. a word or phrase) of up to 20 ASCII characters. Additional search paths and/or drives may be specified by using Option 1.
Vol. 4 No. 10

Program: FRACTAL
Author: Estvanik
Title: Fundamentals of Fractals, Part 2
Vol. 4 No. 11

Program: DSKWATCH
Author: Holzner
Title: Watching for Disk Errors
Purpose: reports all the intermittent errors DOS encounters during its disk operations
Vol. 4 No. 12

Program: bar chart programs, including double, solid, stacked, and high- resolution stacked bar charts
Author: Cuellar
Title: A Bar Chart for All Reasons
Vol. 4 No. 13

Program: SNAPSHOT
Author: Holzner
Title: A Snapshot for Remembrance
Purpose: Saves your current screen and up to three additional prefabricated screens for immediate display without leaving an application program.
Vol. 4 No. 14

Program: KEEPER
Author: Holzner
Title: Keeper of Lost Commands
Purpose: Stores and displays the last ten commands entered for immediate reexecution without retyping.
Vol. 4 No. 15

Program: CACHE
Author: Holzner
Title: How to Realize Cache Savings
Vol. 4 No. 16

Program: BAC
Author: Dickinson
Title: End Big Blue's Backup Blues
Purpose: backs up all (or selected) files in a directory to hard or floppy disks, permitting disk changes when target disks become full
Vol. 4 No. 17

Program: LOCK and UNLOCK
Author: Holzner
Title: Give Yourself PC Privacy
Purpose: Encrypts a file, rendering it unreadable to anyone who does not know the user-chosen passphrase. Complementarily, using the same passphrase, de-encrypts the file.
Vol. 4 No. 18

Program: PRSWAP
Author: Dickinson
Title: Getting Graphics to Speak ASCII
Purpose: converts IBM text-graphics characters into ASCII characters that can be printed by nongraphics printers
Vol. 4 No. 19

Program: DDIR
Author: Petzold
Title: Double Duty DIR Display
Purpose: Displays all (or selected) directory entries in double columns, sorted in alphabetical order.
Vol. 4 No. 20

Program: DELZ
Author: Holzner
Title: Deleting Made Complete
Purpose: Allows you to delete a file absolutely by writing over the sector(s) it occupies.
Vol. 4 No. 21

Program: VTREE
Author: Petzold
Title: A Sight Better than TREE
Purpose: Provides a visual representation of the tree-structured subdirectories on a hard or floppy disk.
Vol. 4 No. 22

Program: SWEEP
Author: Petzold
Title: Cleaning Up with SWEEP
Purpose: Causes a command to be successively executed in every subdirectory on a hard disk.
Vol. 4 No. 23

Program: WAITASEC and SCROLL
Author: Petzold
Title: WAITASEC While I Get That
Purpose: WAITASEC uses the single-keystroke ScrollLock key to halt a fast-scrolling display; then allows you to scroll backwards, recalling previous screens. SCROLL works with WAITASEC but first saves the current display
Vol. 4 No. 24

Program: MONOGRAF.DRV
Author: Petzold
Title: Green Screen 1-2-3 Graphics
Purpose: Displays 1-2-3 bar and stacked-bar graphs on a monochrome monitor.
Vol. 4 No. 25

Program: KEY-FAKE
Author: Petzold
Title: KEY-FAKEing Keystrokes
Purpose: Supplies the series of keystrokes needed to initialize an application program on boot-up.
Vol. 4 No. 26

Program: SIZE and FREE
Author: Merrill
Title: Sizing Up Your Files
Purpose: FREE.COM reports the number of unallocated bytes on a floppy or hard disk. SIZE.COM calculates the storage requirements of a file or group of files, based on the number of DOS clusters necessary to make floppy disk and hard disk copies. ATSIZE.COM, written for the PC AT, appeared on the Utilities disk
Vol. 5 No. 1

Program: BOOT
Author: Norton
Title: Custom-Made Boot Messages
Vol. 5 No. 2

Program: DOS-EDIT
Author: Petzold
Title: Fix Up Commands with DOS-EDIT
Purpose: Permits moving to, editing, and reentering on-screen DOS commands without retyping.
Vol. 5 No. 3

Program: KBM
Author: Rollins
Title: A Mouse in Your Keyboard
Vol. 5 No. 4

Program: QUICKEYS
Author: Forrest
Title: Speeding Up Your Keyboard
Purpose: Accelerates the "typematic" repeat rate of a PC or XT keyboard. A built-in subprogram is included that instantly clears the keyboard buffer to prevent sending excess accumulated keystrokes to the display.
Vol. 5 No. 5

Program: BROWSE
Author: Petzold
Title: Just Looking, Thank You
Purpose: Permits scrolling forward and backward throughout a file without use of a word processing program.
Vol. 5 No. 6

Program: RENDIR
Author: Dickinson
Title: RENDIR unto \Caesar
Purpose: Permits renaming subdirectories directly, without creating a new directory, moving the contents of the old one into it, and then removing the old directory.
Vol. 5 No. 7

Program: DISKSCAN
Author: Petzold
Title: DISKSCAN Finds Bad Sectors
Purpose: Locates and identifies disk errors on hard and floppy disks, Bernoulli Boxes or other similar storage devices.
Vol. 5 No. 8

Program: NO and REVEAL
Author: Petzold
Title: Make Exceptions with NO.COM
Purpose: Excludes specified files in a subdirectory from the action of a command.
Vol. 5 No. 9

Program: PUSHDIR and POPDIR
Author: Friend
Title: Stacking Up Subdirectories
Purpose: Provides a way to return automatically to your current directory after running programs that require directory changing.
Vol. 5 No. 10

Program: ATTR
Author: Petzold
Title: Changing DOS File Attributes
Purpose: ATTR.COM permits display and modification of the archive, system, hidden, and read-only file attributes.
Vol. 5 No. 11

Program: SETUP
Author: Prosise
Title: Set 'em Up on the House
Purpose: Permits menu-oriented selection and immediate transmission of printer control codes from within a running application program.
Vol. 5 No. 12

Program: STATLINE
Author: Socha
Title: Status Symbols for Your PC
Purpose: Displays 26th-line status indicators for the NumLock, CapsLock, and ScrollLock toggle keys on IBM monochrome, CGA, and Compaq monitors.
Vol. 5 No. 13

Program: EGACOLOR, EGACOSET, EGAPRMOV, EGAMODE, EGAPAGE, EGAPALET
Author: Petzold
Title: Exploring the EGA, Part 1
Purpose: EGACOLOR permits temporarily remapping any of the 16 default colors displayable on a 200-line CGA monitor to any of the 64 colors displayable on a 350-line Enhanced Color Display connected to an Enhanced Graphics Adapter.
EGACOSET and EGAPRMOV load a customizable 16 (of 64) color palette that is reloaded each time video mode 3 is set.
EGAMODE reports/changes the current video mode.
EGAPAGE reports/changes the current video page.
EGAPALET displays all 64 EGA colors simultaneously on a 350-line color monitor.
Vol. 5 No. 14

Program: CS, EGA12, EGA25, EGA35, EGA43, EGA512, EGAITAL, EGAPRTSC
Author: Petzold
Title: Exploring the EGA, Part 2
Purpose: CS (EGA Clear Screen) clears the screen when using displays of more than 25 lines.
EGA12 resets number of screen rows to 12 when used with an EGA and a 350-line (Enhanced Color or Monochrome) monitor.
EGA25 resets the EGA default font and 25-row display after using programs (several of which are on this disk) that change these conditions when using an EGA and a 350-line (Enhanced Color or Monochrome) monitor.
EGA35 resets number of screen rows to 35 when used with a 350-line (Enhanced Color or Monochrome) monitor and an EGA.
EGA43 resets number of screen rows to 43 when used with an EGA and a 350-line (Enhanced Color or Monochrome) monitor. EGA50 resets number of screen rows to 50 when used with an EGA and a 350-line (Enhanced Color or Monochrome) monitor.
EGA512 permits switching between two loaded EGA fonts when used with a 350-line (Enhanced Color or monochrome) monitor and software that supports display of bold characters.
EGAITAL produces a displayable italic font from the default EGA font when used with a 350-line (Enhanced Color or Monochrome) monitor.
EGAPRTSC replaces the normal Print Screen BIOS routine to permit using the Shift-PrtSc command with EGA displays with more than 25 rows.
Vol. 5 No. 15

Program: XDEL
Author: Czapala
Title: Weed Out Excess Files with XDEL
Purpose: Successively presents each filename in your current directory for single-keystroke file deletion or retention.
Vol. 5 No. 16

Program: POP-CAL
Author: Forrest
Title: A Calendar for All Seasons
Purpose: Pops up a calendar window for any month from January, 1583 to December, 9999.
Vol. 5 No. 17

Program: VISITYPE
Author: Holzner
Title: Beat the Beeps with VISITYPE
Purpose: Expands the PC's normal 15-character typeahead buffer to 80 characters.
Vol. 5 No. 18

Program: CHANGE
Author: Mefford
Title: Quick-Change Artistry
Purpose: Performs a rapid search-and-replace operation for text strings and/or ASCII decimal codes throughout a file of maximum 40,000-byte length.
Vol. 5 No. 19

Program: SUGGEST
Author: Mefford
Title: The Power of Suggestion
Purpose: Flashes a message on the screen at selected rates and durations ranging from many minutes to a brevity approaching the limit of subliminal perception.
Vol. 5 No. 20

Program: DISKPREP
Author: Prosise
Title: Retrofitting a DOS System
Purpose: Permits making a floppy disk self-booting even if the DOS "system" files were omitted when the disk was formatted and program files have subsequently been added to it.
Vol. 5 No. 21

Program: FREEZE
Author: Prosise
Title: FREEZE Out File Filchers
Purpose: Ensures confidentiality of in-memory data when it is necessary to leave a PC running without storing the data to a removable medium or encrypting it. FREEZE temporarily suspends program operation, blanks the screen, and disables the Ctrl-Alt-Del reboot sequence until a user-entered password (up to 64 characters) is re-entered.
Vol. 5 No. 22

Program: DIREX
Author: Holzner
Title: Files Fly with DIREX
Purpose: Facilitates copying, deleting, protecting, or unprotecting selected files in a directory.
Vol. 6 No. 1

Program: PARSE
Author: Mefford
Title: A Command You Can Count On
Purpose: Displays the number of characters, words, and sentences in ASCII text files.
Vol. 6 No. 2

Program: TIMEKEY
Author: Prosise
Title: Playing the Dating Game
Purpose: Inserts the date and/or time into documents being created by other applications programs.
Vol. 6 No. 3

Program: SEARCH
Author: Mefford
Title: A Very Savvy Search Utility
Purpose: Searches all or specified directories on a disk for either designated filenames or the first occurrence of character strings within files.
Vol. 6 No. 4

Program: ASC
Author: Prosise
Title: Instant ASCII at Your Service
Purpose: Provides a pop-up ASCII chart showing decimal, hexadecimal, and character equivalents for the full IBM character set.
Vol. 6 No. 5

Program: COPYSAFE
Author: Mefford
Title: Preventing COPY Disasters
Purpose: Prevents accidentally over-writing files when using the COPY command.
Vol. 6 No. 6

Program: XDIR
Author: Prosise
Title: Instant Access to Directories
Purpose: XDIR.COM is a memory-resident utility that allows you to display the filenames in any drive/directory even when you are running another applications program.
Vol. 6 No. 7

Program: PLAY
Author: Mefford
Title: A DOS Music Generator
Purpose: Provides many of the music-producing functions of the BASIC PLAY statement without the need to work in BASIC.
Vol. 6 No. 8

Program: DRAW, BSAVE, BLOAD, LOWRES, HIGHRES
Author: Mefford
Title: DRAWing Made Easy
Purpose: Provides low-resolution (320 x 200) color or high-resolution (640 x 200) monochrome drawing capabilities on a color, enhanced color, or (with some MGA boards) a monochrome display, without the need to work in BASIC.
Vol. 6 No. 9

Program: SLASHBAR
Author: Hummel
Title: Looking Just Like 1-2-3
Purpose: Pops up a Lotus-style menu of the commands needed to operate a non-Lotus applications program. Works with Lab Notes MAKEBAR utility
Vol. 6 No. 10

Program: REPEATS
Author: Mefford
Title: Clean Out Clones the Easy Way
Purpose: Checks all directories on a drive and reports all duplicate filenames.
Vol. 6 No. 11

Program: APPBK (originally titled REMINDER)
Author: Mefford
Title: Your Everyday REMINDER
Purpose: Reminds you of appointments at the times you specify; provides additional optional hourly chime and continuous on-screen date/time display.
Vol. 6 No. 12

Program: PAD
Author: Holzner
Title: Your Pop-up Stenographer
Purpose: pops up over running applications programs and allows you to save up to five pages of comments, phone messages, and the like
Vol. 6 No. 13

Program: DR
Author: Mefford
Title: Doing What DIR Doesn't
Purpose: Provides an integrated set of file management facilities for sorting,
viewing, renaming, deleting, and moving files to another directory.
Vol. 6 No. 14

Program: DIRNOTES
Author: Mefford
Title: Adding Notes to Directories
Purpose: presents a DOS-format, alphabetically-sorted directory listing in the left portion of the display, together with a coordinated, 38-character field on the right side in which you can enter descriptive comments about the file contents, hot-keys, etc. Your notes are automatically saved when the Esc key is pressed, in a file called DIRN-abc.DAT, where abc represent the first three letters of the directory name.
Vol. 6 No. 15

Program: RN
Author: Mefford
Title: A Directorywide File Manager
Purpose: Simplifies creating, removing, renaming, hiding, unhiding, and changing to directories. Also sets/resets the read-only and archive bits of all files within a directory, and reports filecount and space allocated. Allows immediate call-up of DR.COM (Volume 6 No. 14) for handling individual files.
Vol. 6 No. 16

Program: CARDFILE
Author: Prosise
Title: Desktop Filing and Dialing
Purpose: Combines a database of names, addresses, phone numbers, and memo-IDs with a Hayes-compatible autodialer.
Vol. 6 No. 17

Program: SNIPPER
Author: Kihlken
Title: What Print Screen Should Have Been
Purpose: Copies any portion of a text screen to a printer or file, or inserts it as keyboard input into an applications program.
Vol. 6 No. 18

Program: CTYPE
Author: Prosise
Title: Getting Control of Your Cursor
Purpose: recovers the cursor when it disappears upon leaving an application, and permits setting cursor shape.
Vol. 6 No. 19

Program: STICK
Author: Prosise
Title: A Colorfast Screen and Stable Cursor
Purpose: Locks/unlocks a cursor size and shape set with CTYPE.COM (Volume 6 Number 19); similarly locks/unlocks a choice of EGA foreground and background colors; and permits selective replacement of the EGA BIOS code for CGA emulation.
Vol. 6 No. 20

Program: CO
Author: Mefford
Title: The Compleat Copy Utility
Purpose: Copies, moves, or deletes files individually or in tagged groups from directory listings sorted by name, extension, size, or date.
Vol. 6 No. 21

Program: PRN2FILE
Author: Kihlken
Title: Capturing Your Printer Output
Purpose: captures any output nominally directed to a printer to a file that can then be edited by a word processor or printed later.
Vol. 6 No. 22

Program: CAPTURE
Author: Kihlken
Title: Capture Your Own Help Screens
Purpose: Saves the text and attribute bytes on the screen to a 4,000-byte file that the HELP.COM program (PC Lab Notes, 1988/No. 1) can pop up either from within an application or at the DOS prompt. Works with PAINT.COM
Vol. 7 No. 1

Program: PAINT
Author: Prosise
Title: Dressing Up Your Help Screens
Edits or creates custom help or reference screens that can be popped up over an application program or at the DOS prompt with the HELP.COM (PC Lab Notes, 1988/No. 1). Also provides full control of character and video attribute bytes and permits insertion of single-line, double-line, or pattern characters from the extended-ASCII PC text-graphics set. Works with CAPTURE.COM
Vol. 7 No. 2

Program: RUN
Author: Mefford
Title: RUNning Programs Effortlessly
Purpose: Executes .COM, .EXE, or .BAT files from any disk directory without requiring changing directories or specifying a path to the file.
Vol. 7 No. 3

Program: no Utilities column
Vol. 7 No. 4

Program: ASPRN
Author: Hummel
Title: ASPRN Cures Laser Printer Headaches
Purpose: substitutes up to 26 user-selected control sequences in the output to a printer for simple macro-designating keystrokes entered in the text.
Vol. 7 No. 5

Program: CALC
Author: Boling
Title: A Programmer's Pop-Up Calculator
Purpose: a pop-up programmer's calculator with base conversion, bit-shifting, logical operator, and mod functions, and 32-bit number representation that also supports a 2-decimal place integer arithmetic calculations.
Vol. 7 No. 6

Program: TOUCH
Author: Mefford
Title: Reach Out and TOUCH Your Files
Purpose: changes the time and date fields of files.
Vol. 7 No. 7

Program: STAYDOWN
Author: Prosise
Title: Splitting Up the Keyboard Combos
Purpose: Turns awkward keystroke combinations into keystroke sequences. It temporarily locks down any Ctrl, Alt, or Shift key that is pressed until it receives the break code from a second key. A welcome relief for handicapped members of the user community who are physically limited to pressing a single key at a time.
Vol. 7 No. 8

Program: RECORDER
Author: Kihlken
Title: Analyzing Your RAMdisk Needs
Purpose: Recorder will help you decide how to distribute your available resources. It measures your usage of disk I/O by keeping track of how many times each of your files is accessed.
Vol. 7 No. 9

Program: TOGGLE
Author: Prosise
Title: Staying in Sync with Your Keyboard
Purpose: A compact program that reports and lets you change the state of your computer's CapsLock, NumLock, and ScrollLock keys, either from the DOS command line or from within a batch file.
Vol. 7 No. 10

Program: COMPARE
Author: Mefford
Title: COMPARE Simplifies File Matchups
Purpose: presents two documents simultaneously in on-screen windows with only the individual differences highlighted. Differences between the two files are preceded with a few lines of the matching text to provide context. It can also do binary compares for those occasions when you want to compare executable files without being confused by word-wrapped text.
Vol. 7 No. 11

Program: ALLKEYS
Author: Morton
Title: Putting An End to Hotkey Hassles
Purpose: a TSR program that lets you instantly disable or enable the hotkeys used by your other memory resident programs. When you want them, your TSR utilities are there, loaded as usual. When their operation would interfere with your application, you simply toggle them off, leaving them dormant.
Vol. 7 No. 12

Program: SETMODE
Author: Kihlken
Title: Communications and Video Setup with SETMODE
Purpose: a memory-resident utility program that gives you complete control over your communications ports and video modes. It provides the most commonly needed functions of the conventional MODE command and even provides access to information and features DOS ignores completely.
Vol. 7 No. 13

Program: RAMVIEW
Author: Dever and Thomas
Title: RAM Snooping with RAMVIEW
Purpose: a memory-resident memory viewer, you can call it up at almost anytime simply by pressing its hotkey. You can then display any area of memory and search for a particular ASCII string or HEX sequence. It presents memory information in a clear, easily understood format.
Vol. 7 No. 14

Program: FONTEDIT
Author: Mefford
Title: Making Your Own Screen Fonts
Purpose: lets anyone with an EGA or VGA customize or create screen fonts to taste. As you toggle the pixels that make up a character on and off (using either your keyboard or a mouse), you see the results not only in a large Edit window but also in screen size, together with the other characters in that font.
Vol. 7 No. 15

Program: MAKEBAS
Author: Ricciardi
Title: Turning .COM Files into BASIC
Purpose: lets you translate short binary files (charts, spreadsheets, executable programs, etc) into straight ASCII text form inside a BASIC program that re-creates the original when run. You may then send the files over communication systems. This is the revised 1.1 version of MAKEBAS.
Vol. 7 No. 16

Program: DCACHE
Author: Boling
Title: Speed Up Hard Disks with DCACHE
Purpose: a terminate and stay-resident program, is a hard disk cache that speeds up your computer by cutting the disk access time by as much as 50 percent. It reduces response time by keeping the most recently used data from the disk in its own reserved section of RAM.
Vol. 7 No. 17

Program: XPANDISK, XPANBOSS
Author: Mefford
Title: Resize Your EMS RAMdisk on Demand
Purpose: XPANDISK.SYS is an expanded memory disk device driver that, under the control of its companion program, XPANBOSS, permits you to vary the amount of expanded memory allocated to a RAMdisk without rebooting. Your hardware must conform to the Lotus/Intel/Microsoft specification as it makes use of an Expanded Memory Manager.
Vol. 7 No. 18

Program: TED
Author: Kihlken
Title: The Tiniest Editor You'll Ever Need
Purpose: a tiny full-screen editor intended for line-oriented files up to 64K in size. TED makes full use of the keyboard cursor keys for moving and scrolling; it lets you cut, copy, paste, and print; and it supports the IBM character set, so you can use special-purpose characters as well as embedded escape sequences for printers.
Vol. 7 No. 19

Program: CONFIG.CTL
Author: Mefford
Title: Choose CONFIG.SYS Options at Boot
Purpose: a device driver that enables you to modify your CONFIG.SYS configuration dynamically, right during the boot.
Vol. 7 No. 20

Program: LOG
Author: Prosise
Title: LOG Your PC's Activity
Purpose: a compact, memory-resident utility that keeps track of every application program you run, complete with dates, times, and even the command line parameters you used when invoking your programs. Just one glimpse at the ASCII log files LOG generates and there will be no question about how your computer has been spending its time.
Vol. 7 No. 21

Program: ENVELOPE
Author: Saidikowski
Title: Envelopes on Lasers Are Easy
Purpose: A memory-resident utility that captures a name and address field from the screen and prints it, with an optional return address, on an envelope fed into a laser printer.
Vol. 7 No. 22

Program: BCOPY
Author: Boling
Title: Background Copying Without OS/2
Purpose: a memory-resident utility that copies files in the background so the user does not have to wait until the copying is completed before continuing his work
Vol. 8 No. 1

Program: ANSI
Author: Mefford
Title: ANSI.SYS Without the Hassle
Purpose: a memory-resident utility that enables selectable use of the extended screen and keyboard control sequences that normally require loading the ANSI.SYS device driver. Unlike ANSI.SYS, ANSI.COM supports all video modes, permits sizing and clearing the key-assignment buffer, and provides high-speed screen updating.
Vol. 8 No. 2

Program: SMOOTH
Author: Mefford
Title: SMOOTH Scrolling Means Easy Reading
Purpose: An EGA or VGA text-browsing utility that makes reading from the screen easier by providing smooth scrolling in either direction at user-selectable speeds
Vol. 8 No. 3

Program: ZCOPY
Author: Flanders
Title: File Transfers Fast and Easy
Purpose: transfers files at high speed, via a serial link, between machines that do not share a common disk format
Vol. 8 No. 4

Program: LITES
Author: Prosise
Title: Your Free Software Breakout Box
Purpose: replaces an RS-232 breakout box by displaying the status of the DTR, DSR, RTS, CTS, DCD, and RI pins; also indicates the data rate, parity, number of data bits, and number of stop bits of the serial port being monitored
Vol. 8 No. 5

Program: MONO
Author: Mefford
Title: Handling Colors on Your Laptop
Purpose: makes the display of color applications legible on laptop
computers and other monochrome screens that have limited intensity range
capabilities by translating the color attributes into black-and-white.
Vol. 8 No. 6

Program: LASERLST
Author: Holmes and Flanders
Title: Landscape Mode to the Rescue
Purpose: formats text files so that the information of two standard-sized pages is printed side by side on a single landscape-mode page when printed with an HP LaserJet (or compatible) laser printer
Vol. 8 No. 7

Program: MOUSECTL
Author: Mefford
Title: Fine-tuning Your Mouse Motion
Purpose: provides multiple sensitivity settings for achieving more precise and smooth control of IBM and Microsoft mice
Vol. 8 No. 8

Program: SLICE, SPLICE
Author: Flanders and Holmes
Title: SLICE Oversize Files Down to Floppy Size
Purpose: distributes a DOS file that is too large to be copied onto a single floppy disk among multiple diskettes, enabling the file to be restored onto a second computer
Vol. 8 No. 9

Program: SETUP2
Author: Prosise
Title: Printer Control: The Easy Way
Purpose: sends menu-selected or typed control codes to a printer from within an application or from the DOS prompt
Vol. 8 No. 10

Program: COLOR.EXE
Author: Prosise
Title: Putting Color in the OS/2 Kernel
Purpose: a protected-mode utility for setting forground and background screen colors from the full-screen (text) command line in OS/2, Standard Editions 1.0 and 1.1
Vol. 8 No. 11

Program: EMS40.SYS
Author: Boling
Title: Expand Extended memory with EMS.SYS
Purpose: emulates the Lotus/Intel/Microsoft Expanded Memory Specification, Version 4.0, in software, permitting extended memory in AT-class machines to be used as expanded memory
Vol. 8 No. 12

Program: CONVERT
Author: Mefford
Title: CONVERT.COM
Purpose: simultaneously displays an ASCII code or whole number between 0 and 65,535 in its hexadecimal, decimal, octal, and binary equivalents; especially useful in translating printer, modem, or EGA monitor escape sequences and setup strings from one number base to another
Vol. 8 No. 13

Program: CHKFRAG
Author: Flanders and Holmes
Title: Speed Up File Loading and Access
Purpose: reports on-screen the extent of file fragmentation on a hard disk and provides an ERRORLEVEL value usable within a batch file to call a defragmenting program
Vol. 8 No. 14

Program: CONFIG.EXE
Author: Duncan
Title: Configuring OS/2 for your System
Purpose: a full-screen editor for inspecting and modifying the direcives contained in an OS/2 CONFIG.SYS file
Vol. 8 No. 15

Program: DIRMATCH
Author: Mefford
Title: Update Your Directories with a Keystroke
Purpose: to display two scrollable, alphabetized directory listings side by side with the more recent of matching filenames highlighted; to provide mark, copy, and move facilities to update the target directory with one or more selected files from the source.
Vol. 8 No. 16

Program: DIMMER
Author: Boling and Prosise
Title: Control the Brightness of Your VGA Screen
Purpose: to provide software control of VGA monitor brightness interactively from the keyboard, through parameters entered on the command line, or at a specified interval after the last keystroke
Vol. 8 No. 17


Program: MENU
Author: Smith
Title: Create Colorful, Interactive Menus for Your Applications
Purpose: to combine information from full-screen displays and user keyboard input to create batch and other program input files under the control of a template file. Full-screen editing facilities are provided for displays of up to 300 lines and up to 100 input fields
Vol. 8 No. 18

Program: EMMA, BESS (originally published as 1STCLASS, COURIERS)
Author: Maclean
Title: 1STCLASS and COURIERS Make Binary Transfers Easy
Purpose: EMMA (1STCLASS) helps you manage your MCI Mail as well as send and receive ASCII and/or binary files. It requires the use of BESS (COURIERS), a 1.5K TSR serial port driver program, and a customized script file, EMMA.CSF (1STCLASS.CSF)
Vol. 8 No. 19

Program: DEBUGSCR
Author: Mefford
Title: Easy Binary File Transfer Through ASCII Text Files
Purpose: to convert binary files into ordinary ASCII text files, which can be transmitted over MCI Mail and similar services and reconverted to their original binary form using the DOS DEBUG command
Vol. 8 No. 20

Program: PCMANAGE, DCOMPRES
Author: Greenberg
Title: Compress and Expand the Files on Your Hard Disk Automatically
Purpose: to provide automatic compression of infrequently accessed files and automatic decompression when they are called. The user can set the inactive period necessary before a file is compressed, can restrict the drive and/or path of operation, and can specifically exclude named files or directories
Vol. 8 No. 21

Program: ALIAS
Author: Boling and Prosise
Title: Give Yourself a Smart DOS Command Line with ALIAS
Purpose: a TSR utility that enables DOS command-line editing and recall of previously issued commands and that permits assignment of long commands and environment strings to short synonyms ("aliases") or function keys
Vol. 8 No. 22

Program: PCREMOTE
Author: Lahman
Title: PCREMOTE Lets You Work at the Office Without Leaving Home
Purpose: to permit accessing and operating an off-site computer from your own keyboard by using a modem link
Vol. 9 No. 1

Program: BATCHMAN
Author: Mefford
Title: Add music, color, and power to your batch files with BATCHMAN
Purpose: makes batch files more powerful and flexable
Vol. 9 No. 2

Program: PCDATA
Author: Stiller
Title: Protect your data with PCDATA, the data integrity toolkit
Purpose: guards your computer against all kinds of corruption
Vol. 9 No. 3


Program: none
Author: Rubenking
Title: Learn Object Oriented programming while you play video poker
Purpose: Illustrate new pascal techniques
Vol. 9 No. 4


Program: SCHEDULE
Author: Mefford
Title: Track your time and appointments with SCHEDULE
Purpose: Offers an easy way to organize your appontments
Vol. 9 No. 6


Program: PCACCESS
Author: Wiener and Munro
Title: Download utilities the easy way with PCACCESS
Purpose: Shows off the communications cabilities of Quick Basic
Vol. 9 No. 7


Program: TYPEFAST TPFST-AT
Author: Mefford
Title: Give your keyboard pizzazz
Purpose: Set your keyboards typematic rate and initial delay
Vol. 9 No. 8


Program: PAN
Author: Maclean
Title: Introducing PAN.COM, the program animator
Purpose: To tailor fit off the rack software to you work style
Vol. 9 No. 9


Program: COMPUTE
Author: Mefford
Title: COMPUTE.COM: the command line calculator
Purpose: To calculate simple equations using little RAM and fast results
Vol. 9 No. 10


Program: MEMMAP
Author: Glynn
Title: Getting a good look at how DOS allocates memory blocks
Purpose: displays all memory blocks allocated by DOS
Vol. 9 No. 11


Program: PRUNE
Author: Mefford
Title: Trim the directories of your directory tree with PRUNE.
Purpose: Move, Copy, Delete directory branches easily, and quickly.
Vol. 9 No. 12


Program: PMVIEW
Author: Bolling
Title: PMVIEW: a Presentation Manager file browser
Purpose: displays files in a movable resizable window
Vol. 9 No. 13


Program: BAT2EXEC
Author: Bolling
Title: Compile your batch files for added speed with BAT2EXEC
Purpose: to increase productivity and satisfaction
Vol. 9 No. 14


Program: CONCEAL
Author: Mefford
Title: For your eyes only: keeping files private in a PC based office
Purpose: Lets you blank screen and apply password access to any file
Vol. 9 No. 15


Program: CMDEDIT
Author: Nadkarni
Title: CMDEDIT: the PC Magazine DOS command line editor
Purpose: Offers a host o ways to make interface with DOS prompt efficient
Vol. 9 No. 16


Program: PCBOOK
Author: Munro
Title: PCBOOK makes Laserjet print files in booklet form
Purpose: turns readme and other files into handy booklets
Vol. 9 No. 17


Program: CARDFILE
Author: Prosise
Title: CARDFILE for PM: its time to retire yout Rolodex
Purpose: combines search & retrieve capabilities with OS2 point and shoot
Vol. 9 No. 18


Program: SMOOTH
Author: Shaw
Title: Scroll through text files under Windows 3.0
Purpose: Improved version written especially for Windows 3.0
Vol. 9 No. 19


Program: PCSORT
Author: Mefford
Title: Sorting it out: PCSORT outdoes DOS's SORT.EXE
Purpose: does everything SORT.EXE does and more
Vol. 9 No. 20


Program: PRISM
Author: Gerrold
Title: Free your VGA from CGA captivity
Purpose: a VGA palette editor and loader
Vol. 9 No. 21


Program: WINWHERE
Author: Adler
Title: Find your files in Windows 3.0 with WINWHERE
Purpose: a full featured find file utility for Windows 3.0
Vol. 9 No. 22


Program: PCSPOOL
Author: Holmes and Flanders
Title: PCSPOOL lets you get pack to work while you print
Purpose: to free up PC while your print
Vol. 10 No. 1