A Smorgasbord of Subjects

Backups, Multiple Monitors, and Serial Ports

What do backups, multiple monitors, and serial ports have in common--besidesWindows NT, that is? Not much except that my column this month covers thissmorgasbord.

You're Making Backups, Right?
Last month I said that Microsoft had every right to be proud of RAS, theRemote Access Service in Windows NT. The backup software Microsoft included withNT isn't too shabby either. It's not as full-featured as a third-party package,such as Arcada's Backup Exec, Octopus Technologies' Octopus, or Palindrome'sNetwork Archivist, but it's a good starter program.

There's a story that goes with that opinion--isn't there always? Backup,like everything else in NT, is pretty fussy about the hardware you use. Is it onthe Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)? If not, someone had better have written adriver for it.

I should have heeded my own advice. For the system I was building, I thoughtI'd use a Travan technology tape drive, after getting assurances from thedistributor that it worked fine under Windows NT. Once I purchased the drive,however, I called a tape manufacturer who said that Travan software wouldsupport NT soon. Until then, the drive was for use with DOS and Windows 3.xonly. Now they tell me!

Although we've seen an explosion of disk backup formats in the last year,Travan tape drives are certainly the ones to watch. They read and write the oldDC2000, quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) tapes, such as those the Colorado MemoryJumbo drives use. But they also use the new Travan TR-1, TR-2, and TR-3 media.The TR-3 tapes will hold 1.6GB uncompressed, perfect for the ever-larger harddrives that people are buying. The Travan drives also have a street price under$300. Being able to read the older DC2000 backup tapes is a big plus, too.

But I had to deliver reliable backup supported by NT now. I chosethe Exabyte 250i SCSI internal QIC drive. It's an older technology than theTravan tapes, but it holds about 1GB per tape, uncompressed.

What drive should you choose? If you want the best combination of speed andcompatibility, an 8 millimeter (mm) tape drive is still king, and Exabyte isstill the leader. The 4mm Digital Audio Tape (DAT) drive is only slightly behindit; Hewlett-Packard (HP) makes very good 4mm drives. Digital Linear Tape (DLT)holds 10GB or 20GB--and soon 40GB--but it's quite expensive and less common. Allthese drives are faster than QIC drives and don't require preformatted tapes. Ifyou need to send a tape full of computer graphics files to someone, 8mm is thestandard. Whatever you decide, though, make sure it's compatible with NT beforeyou buy it.

Oh, and that rule I mentioned in my first column still applies: When indoubt, use SCSI. Floppy-based and IDE-based backup drives abound for DOS,Windows 3.1, and even Windows 95, but few of these drives work under NT yet.

I installed the Exabyte 250i tape drive, hooked it to the SCSI chain, andturned on the computer. (Well, OK, it required fiddling, but I'm usingjournalistic license to pretend I never waste time.) The SCSI controllersaw the new drive, and NT booted up. I started the Backup program--it's in theAdministrative Tools Program Manager group. Backup reminded me that I needed toinstall my tape hardware and told me where to do it: Windows NT Setup under TapeDrive Setup.

That impressed me--a little. Last month I complained about software beingguru-friendly, not having enough reminders for the rest of us, but that alertbox saved me hours of tearing my hair and reading the manual. I went into NTSetup, chose the Exabyte 250, and rebooted the computer. Then I opened Backupagain.

A second pleasant surprise: NT will back up any drive it's mapped to. FromWindows NT Server, I backed up two complete Windows 95 drives and a Windows NTWorkstation over the network as easily as if I were sitting at those machines.

One exception, however, was that Backup couldn't capture the NTWorkstation's always-open system files. It waited 30 seconds for each one andthen skipped over them. This was a bit curious, because Backup had no problemswith the system files on the server. Otherwise, I had no complaints. Backupworked fine.

On another NT system, I tried out the Exabyte EXB-8700 external SCSI 8mmtape drive. If you need 8mm compatibility and speed in a portable drive, I canrecommend this one, but watch out for the slightly flimsy loading door.

NT Can Do Multiple Monitors, Too!
Macs are famous for their ease of setup and use. One feature Apple liked toshow off in the mid-80s was how quickly you could add a second or third monitor;just drop the card in the system and restart. If you want to rearrange thedisplay, putting one monitor to the right of another or two on top of a third,just drag the pictures of them around in the Monitors control panel. Ditto forthe menu bar; just pick it up and move it within Monitors. If you're unsurewhich monitor is which, the Identify button will tell you.

To this day, the religious wars online between Mac and PC zealots oftenrevolve around this feature. And until recently, Windows had no correspondingcapability.

Microsoft has made strides. With the right display card, NT can haveseveral or many monitors hooked up. This support is not yet in the Mac's leaguefor ease of use, but it's closer. With plug 'n' play in a year or so, NT maycatch up to the Mac in that regard.

The customer in question, the commodities broker I mentioned last month,needed two or three big monitors to run its trading program, which uses all thatscreen real estate. The company chose the Colorgraphic video card, which cansupport up to four monitors on a single PCI card. (Colorgraphic also makes ISAand PCMCIA multiple-monitor cards.) To the Colorgraphic card, the customerhooked 21" Nanao color monitors set at 1280 x 1024 resolution. With threemonitors on one card, this made a total screen area of 3840 x 1024 pixels--quitea sight to see. (Don't try this without a sturdy desk, deep pockets, and astrong back!)

Once the card and monitor are installed and Colorgraphic's suppliedsoftware is installed on the Windows NT Display control panel, you need to setthe screen resolution. Then, after a reboot, a new control panel called SetArrayappears. It's pretty basic, not as flexible or intuitive as the Mac's Monitorspanel, but you can set how many monitors you have horizontally and vertically.Four monitors could be 2 x 2 or 1 x 4 after you reboot. However, you canidentify which monitor is which only by experimenting. I had to swap cablesuntil they appeared 1, 2, 3 on the desk.

But these are minor complaints, things a Mac user migrating to NT willmiss. Anyone who needs multiple monitors will find the Colorgraphic card quiteacceptable.

The four-monitor Colorgraphic card comes with a terminator to use on thefourth plug if you've attached only three monitors. This is important; withoutthe terminator, monitor #3 has a noticeable shadow--not surprising, consideringthe very high frequencies present. Other than this caution, however, I recommendthe Colorgraphic card highly.

It's interesting how many programs don't behave quite right on multiplemonitors. I'm sure that few testers have two or three monitors to test on, butthat's no excuse for Office 95, which seems to contradict Microsoft's ownprogramming guidelines. For instance, if you have a Word document window open onscreen three and maximize it, it goes big on screen one. You must manually sizeand move the window if you want it somewhere else. And several NT messages alsopop up on monitor #1, no matter which monitor has the program.

This situation reminds me of the early days of the Macintosh, whereprograms would do the same sort of things. In that case, as I'm sure will betrue in this one, the cure was time for the developers to realize the problem.

Serial Ports Galore
If you need a lot of serial ports, the classical solution is a multi-portintelligent serial board, one that has an on-board CPU. DigiBoard, Equinox,CompuTone, and others make great boards that include NT drivers. They use memorymapping and perhaps a single interrupt request (IRQ) line to transfer databetween the computer and the outside world. If you need a lot of ports, that'sthe way to go: One board can handle 128 or more serial devices. NT sees COM1through COM128, and the board does the CPU-intensive I/O.

But most of us don't need a roomful of serial devices; we need four orfive: mouse, modem, graphics pad, and maybe a UPS monitoring port. The originalPC supported only two, so additional ones have been tacked on. Each one needs aseparate IRQ, so you need a 16-bit board to have enough IRQs to go around. Forthat, I'd recommend a board such as the one from QuickPath Systems. It has fourserial ports, with settable IRQs, so you can connect all your external devices.It also has two parallel ports, so you can hook up all your printers, too, andstill use only one ISA slot.

On the QuickPath, like most good serial cards, each serial port uses a16550 UART. This chip has an 8-byte buffer for characters; if you turn it on inthe "Advanced" section of the Port Control Panel (it's the "FIFOEnabled" check box), you'll lose fewer characters at high speed.

My main complaint about the QuickPath is that you can set its third andfourth port to high-order IRQs--9 through 15--but not the first two. They can beset only to IRQs 3 through 7. Most Pentium motherboards have two built-in serialports that can use only IRQ 3 or 4, so you may have to turn off two serialports, instead of having a total of six.

On the Road Again
Having explored the basics of Windows NT installation fairly completely, Ifeel a road trip coming on. I've already visited a few special-effects shopsthat use NT, and I'll discuss their work starting next month. Remote-accesssoftware should be mature enough to try pretty soon, and shows like DigitalHollywood are on the horizon. It's great to have so much to write about!