Re: [WinMac] Wintel Equivalent of Conflict Catcher
Bruce Johnson(johnson[at]Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU)
Mon, 07 Sep 1998 09:15:07 -0700
Warren Klope wrote:
>
> I am somewhat new to your list. If these are old topics I apologize, but
> here they are:
>
> 1) Is there a Wintel equivalent to Casady & Greene's Conflict Catcher on the
> MacOS: a marvelous startup controller and conflict diagnostic tool.
No there isn't and it's sorely needed
>Also, several software products seems to need a
> different version of a commonly utilized DLL.
And this is exactly why...This is one of the biggest headaches of Windows.
Win98 attempted to fix this my removing older copies of a large number of
.dlls and replacing them with 'standard' ones, but all this accomplished was
ensuring that Microsoft products were the about the only ones that ran. :-(
All they needed to do was make programmers rename their customized .dlls
rather than replace standard ones with their changed ones. It's a simple fix,
really, just lazy programmers.
> 2) How can I have a virtual C: drive where all the partitions and physical
> hard drives appear as one drive.
>
> Reason for request. Windows dependence on absolute paths is cumbersome to
> put it mildly. Every time you need to move some application folders which
> have a lot of subapplications to a different partition or physical
> harddrive, the nightmare begins. Gimme Space or Big Disk seem to be
> possible solutions because they offer virtual drive capabilities. Have not
> been able to try them due to using System Commander per problem #1 above.
>
> I have asked several of the Wintel "experts" at various sources: University,
> Computer Stores, Local School system wizards, etc. I hope you can shed some
> light on this.
Arrgh don't get me started...I've had this very thing happen to me at work. A
new person, a long time Mac user, started working in a lab, and rearranged her
system so that it seemed familiar...Windows went into a folder called
'System', the programs were all collected and put into 'Programs', etc. Then
of course, it wouldn't even start...
After that she was unsure if she should even turn the thing back on for fear
of breaking it.
The only solution is to NOT move anything once you've installed it, or move it
by re-installing it. Cumbersome, true, but it's the only way.
Well, not the only way...there are some Windows registry search and replace
utilities that will go through your registry and replace all the old path
references with the new ones. Of course this usually takes a few iterations to
get right (MS Access, for instance, puts about a copuple hundred or more
entries into the registry...some are slightly different, and lots of things
break when they're not all right.)
The Windows registry is Microsofts feeble attempt at duplicating the Mac
Desktop db files and prefs files, feeble because there's no simple way of
'rebuilding' the desktop.
All file association is still managed by user editable file extensions, rather
than somewhat harder to edit file creator/type codes, and given it's
underpinnings of DOS, it _still_ has an absolute 256 byte path limit. If
you're going to depend on paths, at least make them Unix style environmental
variables that can be as long as you want or need. I am at the point on my
workstation at work that I can no longer add anything to my path...I'm screwed
if I want to install anything anywhere other than in the directories already
on my path if the program needs to use the DOS PATH variable, which a
surprising number of programs still do.
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on Mon Sep 07 1998 - 09:17:20 PDT
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