benw@desoto.UUCP (B Weber) (07/03/84)
I guess the big Atari news is the sale of Atari. Both the video game and computer divisions have been sold; Warner is retaining the Coin-Op division. The TV news just said that it was sold to the man who formerly ran Commodore... though his name escapes me at the moment, is this the same guy who just left Commodore after umpteen years there? I wonder if the name Atari will still be used, or will Warner keep rights to that name. Judging from the internal conflicts between Warners and Atari, I think this is for the best...Atari should be owned by computer company, not by a giant entertainment conglomerate. Opinions? On other things, a couple of words about printers. My computer is begging for a printer, but my pocketbook cringes at the idea, so I've been looking for a low cost (under $200) printer. I actually bought the Alphacom 41 printer for $90, but returned it the next day. The print quality was fine, the speed was fine, it could do graphics, but one thing I hadn't thought of made me return it...the paper. It comes with thermal 4.5 inch roll paper. I didn't think it would make a difference, but after disassembling a 30 sector file, I had a completely unmanageable strip of paper covering my living room floor. THe output resembles a huge supermarket cash register receipt. Besides, the printer is cheap but the paper (which is not that big a roll) costs almost $5.00 a roll. I will be getting an Atari 1025 printer. Seems the bottom fell out of the price, and they're selling around here for $189 (not bad for a printer listing at $550 and selling in the magazines for ~$350). I'd appreciate any feedback from people using that printer already. Another random note. I have a Rana 1000 disk drive; it's my third and IT doesn't work any better than my first two (which went back to the factory). Since my warantee was up, I took the metal lid off to perhaps see why the drive was getting CRC checks all over the place when trying to read. When I took the lid off, the drive worked like a charm. Put the lid on, the drive went flakey again. Lid off, fine. All I had to do was APPROACH the drive with the lid, and it went bad again. I called RANA, and they knew about the problem... the motor was improperly shielded. They wanted me to send it back to the factory, but after 2 other turkeys, I decided to keep the drive and simply operate it with he lid off (I keep it covered when not in use). I've used it this way for about a month now, and I haven't had a single misread sector. If you have a RANA drive under warantee and it is acting flakey (like taking 5 minutes to load a program), you should call RANA. (By the way, does anyone know how to shield the motor? It's an MPI half height mechanism). Ben Weber pyuxmm!benw AT&T Technologies Piscataway, NJ