The Xanadu Utilities 1.0 (c) Copyright 1987 by Tony Overfield and Robert Woeger ______________________________________________________ The Xanadu utilities are a collection of useful small utilities which were designed to help you get the most out of your PC. The utilities may be freely copied and given to other PC users with the following restrictions: 1. You must distribute the Xanadu utilities in their original form with no modifications, additions, or deletions. 2. No fee may be charged for the Xanadu utilities other than a disk duplication fee (not to exceed $10). 3. Software authors and software companies may include the Xanadu utilities with their programs as long as it is made clear that the Xanadu utilities are "bonus" programs and that the customers have not paid for the right to be registered Xanadu utility users. 4. The software in the Xanadu utilities is copyrighted by Tony Overfield and Robert Woeger, and only they or their authorized representatives may accept payments (registrations) for the programs. Xanadu Compusoft is the only company authorized by the authors to accept payments and registrations for the Xanadu utilities. The Xanadu utilities are a continually evolving collection of small, useful utilities which are written in assembly language for speed. The utilities are distributed via the Shareware software distribution method and may be given to others as long as the above conditions are met. With Shareware, you get to try out the programs before you decide whether or not to buy them. This prevents you from being "stuck" with programs you don't want or can't use. We strongly back the idea of Shareware and continue to improve our software because we feel that our satisfied users deserve the best from us. If you find the Xanadu utilities useful, we ask that you send us a registration fee and become a registered Xanadu utility user. In doing so, you will be helping us further the development of this software, plus you will gain many benefits that we hope you will enjoy. Registration gives you the legal right to use our software on your machine. Corporate and governmental users of the Xanadu utilities are required to register each copy of our software that is used on separate machines. Site licenses, quantity discounts, and special arrangements are all available. Please write for details. We offer 2 unique registration options: 1) For $25, you will become a registered user and receive a diskette with the latest version of the Xanadu utilities along with some bonus program(s), registration verification, news of new versions and products, and special discount offers for new software. 2) For $35, you will receive the above benefits, plus you will receive a customized version of the Xanadu utilities which will contain a unique serial number embedded in it. This number can make you money - all you have to do is pass your copy around to your friends, bulletin boards, and other computers. Everyone who registers their copy with us for $35 and uses your serial number will cause a $4 check to be sent to you. In this way you will get an extra benefit each time a person downloads a copy of the Xanadu utilities which has your serial number embedded in it and chooses to register that copy. You could make $40 a month if only 10 people/month register with your serial number! This more than pays for the $35 registration, and those $4 checks can really add up. Note: We add 6.25% Texas sales tax to orders within Texas. All shipping charges are INCLUDED in the above $25 and $35 prices. To Order by Phone ----------------- Please call (409) 693-6286 and be ready to give us the following information: Please state that you want to order the Xanadu Utilities. Choose either the $25 or $35 registration option (see above). Please state the quantity that you are ordering. Have your credit card (MC/VISA) number and expiration date handy. Also please give the operator the serial number of your copy (if available). Orders are normally processed within 2-4 days. We ship both through UPS and via regular mail. All orders are sent regular mail (First class) if you don't specify. The office hours for orders are 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday, and 10am to 1pm on Saturday (Cental Time). After those hours you may leave a message on our machine with your order (please include the product name, price, your name, address, phone, and credit card number and expiration). To Order by Mail ---------------- Send check or money order along with the appropriate Texas sales tax (6.25%) if you reside within Texas. Please include your name, company name (optional), address, phone (optional), and the serial number of the copy you have (type HDIR/i to get the serial number). Item Texas Address Out of state Xanadu Utilities (Disk, $ 26.56 $ 25.00 Registration, News) Xanadu Utilities (Disk, Registration, News, Serial $ 37.19 $ 35.00 Number) Mail to: Xanadu Compusoft P.O. Box FF College Station, TX 77841 Description of the programs in the utilities -------------------------------------------- The Xanadu utilities currently consists of 3 programs which are all included in the XANADU.ARC distribution file. The names of the files that make up the Xanadu utilities are: HDIR.COM - The HotDIR, colorful sorted directory program 2.0 Displays different colors based on file extension. Many options too! Works on Monochrome, Color, & EGA. PCSTAT3.COM - PC Status Utility 3.0 - Displays Disk/RAM statistics and other information in a well organized format. It is much faster than CHKDSK too! New colors added. SFIND.COM - Super File Find 1.02X - Finds files fast anywhere on your disk (even inside ARC files). XANADU.DOC - This documentation file HDIRCOLS.DOC - Documentation on how to customize colors in HotDIR PCSTAT3 ------- PCSTAT is our PC Status Utility which performs many functions similar to the DOS CHKDSK command. The advantage in using PCSTAT is that it is much smaller on the disk and faster than CHKDSK! PCSTAT also displays more information than CHKDSK and provides an organized output format. A new feature in PCSTAT 3.0 is the use of vivid colors within the program. The colors really show you your PC's status. It runs on a monochrome, color, and EGA system. The format for running PCSTAT is: PCSTAT3 d: (where d: represents the disk drive you want information about. If you do not specify a drive, the default drive is used.) PCSTAT will respond by displaying the date, time, day of week, disk volume label, DOS Version, DOS VERIFY status, BREAK status, disk statistics for the drive, and amount of RAM installed and free. SFIND ----- SFIND, Super File Find, is a utility which searches the entire disk and returns back a list of the location of all matching files. For instance, if you wanted to find all files on a disk ending in .COM, your would type: SFIND *.COM The beauty of SFIND is that it is lightning fast and searches inside of .ARC files also to locate the specified files. This is very handy for people who keep a lot of ARCs on their hard disk, and don't remember where a file is located. Other options are: /n - Tells SFIND not to search ARC files for files /p - SFIND will pause when the screen is full The format for running SFIND is: SFIND [d:] filename.ext [/n /p] Where everything in brackets is optional. Examples: SFIND A:R*.EXE /n will search on A: drive for all files that begin with R and end with .EXE. ARC files will not be searched due to the /n option. SFIND PCSTAT3.* will search on default drive for all files whose filename is PCSTAT3. All ARC files will be searched. No pausing will occur when screen is full. HDIR ---- HotDIR is one of our most popular utilities. It displays a sorted directory listing to the screen, printer, or disk file. Many sorting options are present such as sort by name, extension, date, or size. Also the display may be 1, 2, 4, or 6 columns. Plus we add the Hot Colors (user definable) so that your files will jump out at you on your screen. If you haven't seen HotDIR on a color monitor, you should! Each type of file is displayed in a different color based on its extension. This means that all .COM, .EXE, .BAS, .PAS, .BAT, .ARC files are different colors! You can easily customize HotDIR to meet your color preferences too! The following options are available to you in HotDIR: /c - Clears the screen before HotDIR displays directory and after every pause of screens /p - toggles the Pause mode (on or off) when screen is full /h - displays the Help message (these commands) /i - displays the ID number of the registered user /a - causes HotDIR to produce ANSI.SYS compatible output (Note: Normally HotDIR uses BIOS to display its output) /# - Uses 1, 2, 4, or 6 column display mode (default is 4 column) /r - produces Redirectable ASCII output (so you can save to file or send the output to the printer) /l - Lists files across the screen instead of up and down in columns /n - Primary sort by Name /e - Primary sort by Extension /d - Primary sort by Date /s - Primary sort by file Size /i - registration Information screen including serial number To customize colors, see the HDIRCOLS.DOC file included with the Xanadu utilities. The best way to learn HDIR is to use it and try different combinations! The format to run HotDIR is: HDIR [d:filename or wildcards] [/options] If you just run HDIR with no drive, wildcards, or options, you will see a 4 column display of the files in your current display sorted alphabetically by filename. Only one primary sort option is recognized (the last one specified). All sorts are secondarily sorted by filename. Below are some examples of HDIR commands: HDIR c:\util Displays directory of c:\util files on screen HDIR \ham /r >prn Displays an ASCII directory redirected to the line printer. HDIR /a /d Displays a directory of the current directory sorted by Date using the ANSI display codes. HDIR /2/p/c Displays a 2 column file listing, clears the screen first, and does not pause at the end of each page. The files are displayed from the current directory. After all the files are displayed, you will be shown the number of files that HotDIR has displayed, their total size, and the actual size they take up on your disk. Then HotDIR will display the space remaining on the drive you selected plus its volume label. HotDIR has been tested under DOS versions 2.1, 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2. It should also work on future DOS versions. It works with monochrome, color, and EGA video adapters. HotDIR automatically displays ALL files (hidden, system, directory, archive, read-only, normal). We feel this is far superior to the way the DOS 'DIR' and other directory programs only display some of the files. The reason the ANSI (/a) switch is provided is for those PCs that are not 100% IBM compatible (i.e. TI, Sanyo, etc.) The BIOS on these machines is not the same as on the PC, and the ANSI method of displaying colors must be used for them. We do not recommend using the ANSI option on PC compatibles because it is much slower than BIOS and the colors might not be displayed correctly if you have another utility (TSR) loaded that uses colors. If you do not see colors on your machine when running HotDIR, make sure that you have a color monitor and adapter, and try HotDIR with and without the /a option. If none of the above works, you probably have a device driver or a utility loaded (memory resident) that is doing something strange to the screen. Remove the utility or device driver and try HotDIR again. Operational note: The first time you run HotDIR after you boot your machine you may experience a slight delay while DOS searches your hard disk for data. This is normal, and occurs on hard disk systems the first time you run HotDIR only. We recommend using a hard disk cache program to speed up HotDIR's disk seek time also. Concluding remarks ------------------ Thank you very much for taking the time to obtain the Xanadu utilities and try them out. Whether or not you choose to register your copy and receive the benefits of being a registered user, we ask that you make copies of the Xanadu utilities for your friends and business associates to try out. If you have any comments or suggestions we would like to hear from you. Tony and Robert are always looking for ways to add new functions and make their programs more useable. Thanks to you, Shareware works for all of us. We hope you enjoy our programs and we look forward to serving you in the future. Notice: The Xanadu utilities are distributed on an "AS IS" basis. We assume no responsibility for damages or loss of business arising out of the use or incorrect use of our programs on your machine(s). A common cause for problems users have with running our programs is that they have many TSR (memory resident) utilities already loaded which interfere with our programs. None of our utilities stay memory resident, but if you do find weird things happening, it is a good idea to remove your TSRs from memory before running the Xanadu utilities.