A4000/030 & Workbench3.0
                        (the Working Version)

                          Paul Statham Apr93



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   I am now the proud possessor of an Amiga 4000/030, bought from Sigmacom at
   a measley price of $2995 with 2meg Chip and 2meg fast Ram, a 120Meg IDE
   Harddrive and the 68EC030.

   The difference between this and the full A4000/040

        $1500       Major Incentive
        1/4 Speed   Both run at 25Mhz but the 040's FPU & MMU and
                    internal 50Mhz speed are of course missing
        2Meg less Fast Ram

   Going from a A500 1.3WB to this I have a speed increase of 7.5times, a hard
   drive, the new graphics chips and WB3.0. I even have the option to upgrade
   directly to the 060 if I find I actually need all that speed, at present I
   don't.

   So  What do I think of It????

   The thing's leaving me in the dust for speed. The workbench is so smooth
   and useful. It seems to run just about everything that I did on WB 1.3

   The windows are far better having a single back/front gadget and a iconise
   gadget on the majority of windows which remembers where you last left in
   either state until you reboot.  This means you can neatly stack the
   iconised versions of several windows behind each other with just the
   gadgets showing (say down one side of the screen), however when you bring
   them back to full size they go back to the last full size position.

   The mouse ports are unmarked as to which is which and it doesn't state
   anything in the manual, logically the one in front is No1 and it is.
   [someone made mention that Commodore had tried every position to place the
   ports but I always wondered why they were never connected to the left and
   right side of the keyboard unit, with a nice touch of a recessed switch
   under the keyboard to swap left and right (for southpaws) since most
   people put their mice (and pads) beside the keyboard]

   The Key Lock only freezes the mouse's position not it's buttons, so if you
   leave it over an active area....... With Commodore realising people want
   some sort of security wouldn't it be more appropriate to lock the mouse
   movement, mouse buttons and all keyboard activity with the one lock??
   This would increase security and give people with small children the
   opportunity to easily leave the computer on and not have the three year
   old accidently erase the hard drive while playing with the mouse and keys
   or just re-boot (it might seem a deliberate three key press to us but
   small hands can accidently find that combination, just press as many grey
   keys as you can kid).

   Manuals:
   Far better than the original WB1.2 in set out and the fact that it is five
   books rather than one massive volume is easier to handle. My only
   observation is that an assumption is made on the readers knowledge of
   AmigaDos. They do carefully explain everything, however the 1.2 Manual did
   have specific excercises that you could follow with screenshots to explain
   the basics of workbench and the CLI (now Shell). I suppose its less likely
   for a novice computer user or someone coming from a IMB DOS only
   environment to buy straight into a A4000. The index is not as effective as
   one could hope for but since the books are smaller, and the pages have
   clear headers a quick flip through soon finds what your looking for.

   Other than those minor points I can not fault the machine. In comparison
   to the A500 running a 68010 the speed and capability of this machine is
   about as far ahead of my needs as the A500 was five years ago with the
   exception of storage, I can now seem me filling 120Meg fairly shortly (12
   months max). This is the top of the range machine only at a slower speed
   but upgradable easily with the processor module being a direct swap if I
   ever need it and the whole thing at a price I can justify.

   Look at it this way I can upgrade to an 060 (when available) for the same
   cost as someone who bought the A4000/040 and I've saved $1500 (more than
   the cost of the extra 2meg fast ram difference)

   Curiosities after a month of use:

   A list of the unexpected:

   My version of QED will not allow me to Search&Replace literal characters
   such as ctrl-m (which I need to create text data for dataretrieve)
   although you can type them directly into the text.

   DATARETRIEVE has a problem in that when you click on a field the cursor
   doesn't always appear, but if you use the arrow keys to move it it appears
   in the next feild.  The same problem becomes major when editing a screen in
   that you can rarely select any item without it assuming you want another
   feild created. The way out of this is to click the trashcan gadget first
   then select the item/field/text etc.  If you try to select the field a
   number of times rapidly DataRetrieve crashes the whole system.

   DataRetrieve's Font Requester will only accept around 20 fonts (1 size
   equals 1 font) so if your fonts directory contains more it won't let you
   access any of them when you edit a screen.  Create a fonts sub-directory
   somewhere and assign that to fonts: while editing. Since you only need to
   use one or two fonts on each database, plus something fancy for the header
   you shouldn't need more that 20. (Many of the 8colour fonts off FONTS9 A, B
   & C from Megadisc look great as headers). If the same fonts are kept in
   your regular fonts: directory as well Dataretrieve is still happy to use
   them from there under normal use.

   AmigaBasic DONT... It loads the program AmigaBasic and then helps you edit
   a new program in the list window, but the output is garbage, even a simple
   CHR$ list. Icons with Basic as their default call the program up then it
   tells you it can't find the file.

   Keep your Libraries/Devices from WB1.2 1.3 etc.

   WB3.0 doesn't have a narrator.device which a couple of programs including
   the new Excellence!3.0 require for speech. I'm sure there will be a few
   others especially with public domain programs that will look for something
   peculiar to earlier WB's


   Deluxe Music Construction Set:  There's a limit to its music directory
   around the 50 mark so if you have more, create subdirectories.  Also the
   program demands to have directories for /music and /instruments at the same
   level as the program. I just keep my favorites or something I'm working on
   in the /music directory and the rest elsewhere, but ALL the instruments in
   /instruments.

   DPaintIV does a similar thing for its DPaint/8 font. I keep DPaint in a
   Directory called ART: and create a sub-directory ART/fonts just for that
   font. DPaint quite happily then selects all it's other fonts from whatever
   is assigned as FONTS:

   Since I didn't use the Hard Disk Install on DPaintIV it also expects to
   find the disk DPaintIV: a simple assign in the User-startup fixes that.

   NOTE: WB3.0 has three startups;

       s/startup-sequence  It is recommended that you never alter this one
                           Recommendation by Commodore
       s/user-startup      Script file for whatever you want
       dh0:WBStartup (dir) Instead of writing scripts drop the programs and
                           their associated icons in this drawer and WB3.0
                           takes care of the rest (including commodities,
                           screen blankers, Function key Assigns etc.)

   If you run DUIII (Directory Utility) from WBStartup it gives a message
   saying "DUIII has not returned" when its clearly sitting there on the
   screen in front of you.

   Trying to run SpudClock (speaking Clock) the same way does the same thing
   and then holds up the Shell that launched it.

   Preferences:

   Given the number of new and better organised options in the preferences
   drawer you'll probably spend half the first week resetting everything.

   Included are    system/screen/icon font defaults
                   extensive pallette controls
                   blanker/ mouse speed controls
                   screen and printer
                   separate printer graphics option
                   Overscan
                   and not the least WB Pattern

   This last option allows you to have a seperate background picture/pattern
   on the workbench screen, and a different picture/pattern in the windows. I
   use a 320x640 Hires IFF file as my workbench background but I've found if
   you use a smaller image it compensates by tiling the image to fill the
   screen so a small lo-res brush can be turned into an effective background

   ANSI colour codes are now 30 - 37 & 40 - 47 on an eight colour workbench

   Thanks to Peter Lavender for his hint about Pearl/8 and Fullview,
   although with WB3.0 preferences default font options its no longer a
   problem. (included is Pearl/8 which is very similar to Cleen/8)

   HDBackup:

   I had a number of problems trying to back up the hard drive from
   Commodore's supplied backup software.  These included telling me it
   could not back up some of the files and making me acknowledge the fact
   before it carried on.  The backup indexfile it created could not be read
   when I tried to back up (fortunatley it was a one directory backup as a
   test). I eventually got it to back up an entire partition but concerns
   over its accuracy (It wouldn't verify the backup) lead me to abandon that
   idea.

   Since I had just carefuly loaded software and data onto the drive I did a
   Manual Backup by copying back onto floppies the contents of each directory
   and its structure.

        ie: dh1:text/cassette/#? to df0:text/cassette

   This way regardless of the order of the disks I could load everything back
   into place easily with a "copy all" command. Additionally having read the
   piece by Guenter Frick on Manual Blitzing I created a directory structure
   script to run prior to restoring the data. If you then back up only those
   files created or altered after the date of your first full backup the
   process becomes less and less time involving. (Its still less than what it
   would take to reconstruct it all manually).

   The whole thing is a slow process but if you haven't the ready to buy a
   commercial backup program initially its probably worth it. Just remember
   if you have to do a full restore that you load the oldest disks first. The
   Copy command will copy over a file if it already exists and if you load the
   most recent first you'll find yourself with the old version.

  What Else??????

           I keep looking, I keep finding


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