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TidBITS#59/AccessPC

Adam Engst No comments

AccessPC Details

AccessPC 1.0 Insignia Solutions, Inc. 254 San Geronimo Way Sunnyvale, CA 94086 408/522-7600 408/848-7677 408/733-9541 (fax) D1437, UK0032 at AppleLink Rating: 8 Penguins out of a possible 10 Summary: -- AccessPC is a single purpose utility that sits in the background and allows you to mount MS-DOS disks on the Macintosh desktop (assuming of course, that you have a drive that can read and write MS-DOS disks)

Adam Engst No comments

AccessPC Introduction

Apple has always boasted of the SuperDrive's ability to read and write both Mac and MS-DOS disks. Apple's propagandizing statements fail to mention that you have to use Apple File Exchange, a relatively obnoxious, Font/DA Mover-like program, to access the MS-DOS files

Adam Engst No comments

AccessPC Installation

AccessPC ships on a single disk with five items, only two of which need to be installed by dragging to your System Folder and restarting. Those two items are the "~AccessPC" cdev and its associated document "~AccessPC Data." I presume that the tildes sit in front of the file names to make them sort together, and so that the cdev runs after most other INITs and cdevs

Adam Engst No comments

Using AccessPC

I tested AccessPC with a Kennect Drive 2.4 and Rapport as well as an Apple SuperDrive. Besides those two drives, AccessPC supports an external SuperDrive, the Kennect Drive 360 and Drive 1200, the 3.5" and 5.25" external DaynaFile drives, the PLI TurboFloppy 1.4, and the Outbound Portable with the FDHD-compatible drive

Adam Engst No comments

AccessPC Documentation

The manual is short but helpful and generally well-written. I didn't notice any errors and Insignia provided a short index. I'm glad Insignia included the Errata sheet, because it explained a few things that the manual glossed over or had changed since Insignia printed the manual

Adam Engst No comments

AccessPC Problems

As a matter of fact, I've only had a single problem with AccessPC since I've started using it. It surprised me, because I couldn't figure out why it should have happened