king@dciem.UUCP (Stephen King) (09/09/86)
{*}
I have recently been helping my brother set up a business
system on his Amiga. He is using VIP Professional and the
Comspec 2M expansion. It sure is great having 2+ Meg
available for the spreadsheet, but as has been noted, VIP
Professional does chew up a whole bunch of memory by itself.
The program is generally quite good, following 1-2-3 to the
letter, but when it crashes (as it often does on my unadorned
512k system) it really send the poor Amiga wild. (once it
even disrupted the video; moire patterns, like fine textured
gift wrap, then loss of horizontal and vertical sync, then
a pure red screen - no guru med, just dead!)
I can further confirm that the program uses overlays, as some
functions require disk access before the command can be
completely entered. Professional does, however, do the
job if used carefully. VIP is supposed to be working on a mouse
interface and, hopefully, will include a facility for
running macros in _silent_ mode (no screen update). It is a
fairly slow program - probably due to being written in C
whereas 1-2-3 is reportedly written in assembler.
Now the bad news - I stopped by Comspec the other day to see
what was new, and they told me that the 2M RAM board was
being temporarily held from production due to an increase
in the RAM modules. Apparently the 256kByte SIP packages
have increased in price from $40Cdn to $140Cdn due to taxes,
forcing the price of their 2M box to over $2000Cdn. Where
did this tax come from? Who is being protected by a tax
like this? What about the people who may go out of business
because the raw materials are now simply too expensive?
Anyway, Comspec are looking for another source for their
chips, so maybe this won't be the end of their efforts to
offer Amiga owners reliable memory at a not-too-unreasonable
price. I can only hope so.
re - Sasquatch print - shielded ribbon cable is available
- shielded connectors are also available (metal shells)
- probably neither of the above are cheap.
* I am not responsible for any of this
* I have no vested interest in anything but my own Amiga
* Flame invitation - it's starting to get cold up here
in the Great White North.
...sjk...