hobbit@topaz.rutgers.edu (*Hobbit*) (06/08/90)
Before I flame Katz into small glowing krispies, I would like to ask an objective question about this. I grabbed PKZIP off wuarchive to give it a try, discovered that its compression is a bit better than ARC especially for things like .exe files, and went to create a very large archive, say a couple Mb big. Just for laughs. Just to see if this "shareware" was worth it. The first failure was a non-escapable "Please insert COMMAND.COM disk in drive C:", which persisted until a hard reset. The second attempt seemed to correctly build the .ZIP file, but suddenly the machine wouldn't boot. Now I've seen this sort of nonsense before, so I came up from a floppy and CHKDSKed, and discovered that I had effectively LOST many things due to incorrectly allocated clusters, cross-links out the wazoo, and other nasty things that like an idiot I *didn't* write down the first time so I'm still not exactly sure what's scrod and what isn't. Now, I'm running the original ancient DOS 2.11 that came with this machine, which as far as I know works fine and is nice and small. I could believe that this DOS contained obscure bugs related to handing out disk clusters, which PKZIP may have triggered by asking for more space while building the ZIP file. Or it may have been PKZIP's fault. I call upon the past experience of the reader, since I'm just getting into this PC thing and don't have a handle on all the Glorious History. I do know, however, that before playing with PKZIP I was fine, and afterward I was flipping floppies for several hours in an attempt to rebuild the file structure on my HD. Go figure. Authoritative answers only, please, directly to me since I don't particularly keep up with this newsgroup. I would especially appreciate ideas from Phil Katz if he reads this stuff. _H*
janh@hplsla.HP.COM (Jan Hofland) (06/11/90)
I have used PKZIP a fair amount to make archive copies of stuff. I have not experienced any of the above problems, nor have I had any other problems. I first used version 1.02. I now use version 1.10. It's a very worthwhile package of programs, in my opinion. Regards, Jan Hofland