Path: utzoo!censor!geac!yunexus!maccs!cs4g6ag From: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Buying a Clone - Questions. Message-ID: <2521ADB3.17675@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> Date: 28 Sep 89 05:35:47 GMT References: <1989Sep25.182151.11161@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> Reply-To: cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Stephen M. Dunn) Organization: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario Lines: 46 Jim Alain Laredo writes: $ I am planning to buy PC-Clone to develop some software, after $shopping around looking for the best deal I found one that comes with $everything but the monitor. It includes a 40 MB Conner Hard Disk $(model CP340 28mS) a whole bunch of features and a TTL video adaptor. $I am planning to buy a monochrome monitor and I intend to run packages $like turbo-c, turbo-pascal, and other windows software like vitamin C. $ My questions are: $ - Is this brand of HD reliable?, have you heard about it?, have $ you had any experience? I've never heard of it, so I can't recommend one way or the other. If you find it to not be a good choice, you might want to consider the Miniscribe 3053 (half-height, 44 Mb, 25 ms) - I've had mine for just over a year and it's great; my brother also has a Miniscribe and has had no problems with it, and the computer shop he used to hang out at almost never had one come in for repairs. There was a discussion somewhere a while ago in which someone suggested that Miniscribe had gone under ... I don't recall if the final consensus was that this was true or not. $ - Do I need any additional circuit boards to run the different window $ environments?, what are the so called Monographic HCG cards, that $ are announced in some flyers? Monographic (or Hercules or HGC) cards are monochrome graphics cards. IBM originally offered two display cards for its PCs - the monochrome display adapter, which did only text, or the pitiful CGA. Hercules came up with a card that was compatible in text mode with the MDA but which offered a graphics mode which was vastly superior in resolution to the CGA (720x348 as opposed to 640x200; in fact, it even beats the EGA). This much-cloned card is the original monographic card. Most serious business software supports the Herc (Symphony/Lotus, Harvard Graphics, various incarnations of Windows, WordPerfect, just to name afew); many video games don't (although there are programs around to emulate a CGA on a Herc). Turbo Pascal 4 and up (and, I believe, recent versions of Turbo C as well) support the Herc. -- Stephen M. Dunn cs4g6ag@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca **********************************************************************= "\nI'm only an undergraduate!!!\n"; "VM is like an orgasm: the less you have to fake, the better." - S.C.