Smart Control Of Your Pc
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday September 29, 1993
Many people buy personal computers thinking they will do all sorts of wonderful things with them - from writing novels to managing finances to educating the kids. But after the initial surge of interest and excitement, the thing sits on a desk collecting dust, or it's used as a glorified games machine by the kids and a typewriter by mum and dad who write the occasional letter.
Its potential is often never realised and the PC becames little more than an expensive monument to keeping up with the Joneses.
Still, getting the PC to do more is often easier said than done.
Using it to communicate with the world sounds exciting, and it can be -until you run into the software which governs how and in what way you send and receive information. Obtuse? Absolutely opaque and user aggressive would be better descriptions. Progress is often purely accidental.
Windows made the job of using communications software a lot easier with its Terminal program, a lovely piece of work that is simple and very easy to set up and use.
But there is something better, and more sophisticated, and it operates from Windows : Hayes's Smartcom.
This is one of the new generation of communications programs aimed at people with little or no computing experience, and who know only Windows, while at the same time looking after the power user.
Its excellence lies in the simple way it allows you to set up and then connect with bulletin boards, mainframe computers and other PCs.
But there are likely to be two problems which might just stump you:
1. Selecting the communications port. Because Smartcom is Windows-based, and because Windows is usually mouse-driven, communication port 1 (COM1) is used by the mouse. If you try to use the modem to connect through COM1, because the mouse is already there the modem will fall over and die. With Dos-based communications programs which do not use a mouse, this isn't a problem. So, keep trying COM ports other than number one until things work - usually numbers three or four with internal modems and number two with external ones.
2. Working out why whatever you're connected to won't talk back, or does so in gibberish. Here it is almost certainly going to be either because you have the wrong terminal emulation or, more likely, you have not configured the stop, parity and data bits to match those of the receiving computer. Sounds technical, difficult and impossible, but take two deep breaths and the problem can be overcome.
With Smartcom, almost every process can be automated using SCOPE scripts. Here Smartcom learns in real time what you do, so that the next time you carry out those actions the "script" can be called up to do it for you.
You can have incoming information, in all its forms, automatically written to a disk or sent to a printer. Smartcom also supports English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.
If you have a number of, say, bulletin boards and mainframe computers you call regularly, then there is no need to load Smartcom each time for each service. All you need do is create the appropriate file within Smartcom for each service, with all the relevant configurations and phone numbers and so on(which is much easier to do than it sounds), give each file a name and save them to any Windows program group as individual icons.
While Windows's Terminal has many of these features, it doesn't have them all. It is a much more basic program. For people with sophisticated and complex communications needs, Terminal is just not up to it, but it was never designed to be.
On the other hand, if all you need is a simple communications program to hook you up to a single service once in a blue moon, it's hard to mount an argument for you to rush out and buy Smartcom.
It is, though, a thoroughly enjoyable program to use and it runs beautifully. It was designed for lazy people, not whiz kids, and you'll have to decide whether you need all its features.
But then, when did any of us ever use any of the programs we have to their fullest?
© 1993 Sydney Morning Herald
Share This