#: 188623 S11/Tandy 600 11-Oct-89 19:58:58 Sb: Review of SpellCheck 600 Fm: Steve Ringley 73727,1202 To: All This last weekend was my first weekend with 600 Basic, and one of the first things that I did was pull out a couple of disks that I had bad-mouthed awhile back to see if they could redeem themselves...and unfortunately they did not! The SpellCheck 600 program that you receive from Club 600 is a "demo" of the actual program. I have no problem with this idea, its just that this was the most miseriable demo I have ever seen. It failed to work with the instructions provided, and the number that you were encouraged to call for hand-holding was disconnected (I think I mentioned that in the last message about this). But what if it had worked, and what if I had sent $75 to "One Step Software" for version 1 of the actual program? First, the program is written in Basic, so it takes forever, and requires three times the memory of the target files due to the support files it creates so that it can use DBCALLS. Secondly, there are no provisions for correcting the errors, instead you keep track of tbe mistakes and their corrections, and afterwards you are supposed to go back into WORD and make all those corrections with the replace function. Supposedly the program will print a list of the mistakes, but it never made it that far. Throughout the documentation, which was actually well written, I was constantly reminded that version 2 and version 3 would correct all these problems, but in the mean time... All-in-all, this is a terrible joke of a title, and it should not be purchased. #: 188624 S11/Tandy 600 11-Oct-89 20:11:53 Sb: #Review of Monitor 600 Fm: Steve Ringley 73727,1202 To: All After what I went through with SpellCheck, I hoped that Monitor 600 would turn out ok...but it did not. Monitor 600 comes with six basic programs in text format, a copy of UTILITY.LIB with Jack Thompson's documentation downloaded from GE, and the usual Club 600 ads. When I think of a monitor, I think of the types of monitors found on Apples and IBM's - utilities that allow one to follow the progress of a ML routine in the system. All this turned out to be was the demo programs for UTILITY.LIB (like CALLT.BAS, INTEST.BAS, etc.) reformatted with Club 600's logo. Two of them did not display properly, and some other thins just did not make sense. Then again the programs are not documented, so I guess that is why... Although $9.95 might not be a bad price to pay for the "conveinence" of having a "Master Copy" of UTILITY.LIB, I think the connect time for downloading the entire set here is less than $4 and they all work at least as they were intended. Scale 1 to 5: 2 #: 189826 S11/Tandy 600 10-Nov-89 11:53:20 Sb: Spellcheck 600 Revisited Fm: Steve Ringley 73727,1202 To: All Now that I have all that memory to play with, I thought I would give my favorite program another try. This time the demonstration worked. I moved all of the necessary files into memory and ran the program. Spellcheck took four minutes to tell me that the demo file had 344 words. Another minute passed, and I was told that there 178 unique words, which I take to mean that there were 178 different words used in the file. After a final minute, the words in "error" were displayed. For some reason beyond me this program needed quite a bit of memory to process a 2k file. The demo takes up about 13k, so simple math tells me that the program had to create more than 8k of temporary files to handle a 2k text file. Another aspect to consider is that the five minute run time was achieved with a "quick" dictionary set that only contained 179 words (yes I counted them!). Wonder what the run time would have been like with the full dictionary...and I still have not been able to get anyone to admit to using this program, besides myself ...and it is protected, so there is no opportunity to see if there is any room for speed inprovements. From what I saw of the temp files that the program created when it was bombing on my 32k setup, the concept was fairly sound. Oh well...