HP - I love you

[isc26330@leonis.nus.sg (ONG TAT-WEE)]

Boy, it sure feels great to have Internet access again!  I've just got my
Zip GSX fixed by a technician friend and I'm now back to 64k cache instead
of the previous 32k due to broken capacitors. :-)

I've also got HardPressed and I must say I'm very impressed by it.  It's so
much faster compared to AutoArk and it doesn't give me that silly "758 files
to compress" dialog box.  The idea of the cache is cool.  LZSS, though slow
in compression, gives me very good speed during decompression.  In fact, on
my Zip 9/64 + AHS, I seldom get to see the HardPressed cursor!  Best of all,
it works so transparently with all my software;  I've yet to find any GS/OS
applications that crash with HP.  Of course, the disk savings I get is a
marvellous feeling.  A games partition that was 512k free became 9 MB free
after compression with HP, and that's WITHOUT compressing the ProDOS 8 games
which take up at least 5 MB again!

Andy and company, you folks sure did a good job!  Keep up the good work and
I'm waiting to see HP 1.1!

Some comments here:  I'd love to see a Profile editor for HP.  In fact, I'm
desperate for one.  I want a profile something like a cross between "Slower:
more compression" and "Standard + ProDOS 8" 'coz there are lots of GS/OS
apps (games!) with data files of TXT and BIN which I want to compress using
LZSS.  The idea of switching between "All: LZSS" and "Standard + ProDOS 8"
all the time in the control panel drives me kind of nuts.  Also, I've seen
the profile skeleton put up in csa2, but how do I use it to write my own
profiles??

And how about a feature in HP to scan for ALL files of a particular type and
compress them using a particular algorithm while leaving the others alone?
Eg. I want to compress only GS/OS S16 files using LZSS but don't want to touch
the others.  Maybe this feature can allow the user to change the compression
algorithm for all files of the same type: eg.  I've previously compressed all
my graphics files using RLE but now I want to scan through my partition for
all of them and convert them from RLE to LZW.  I think this feature will be
useful 'coz when a new more efficient compression algorithm becomes available
for a particular filetype, all the user has to do is to get HP to scan for
that filetype and recompression them using the new algorithm withouth touching
the rest of the files in the HD.

Guess that's all I have to say for the time being.  I'll go play about more
with HP to find more comments to add.  But I must say that for a first
impression after using it for 1.5 weeks, HP is impressive!  Not to put Econ
Technologies down, but AutoArk sure has lots to learn from HP, especially the
expanding a file to memory cache and throwing away the file after quitting.
Why bother to expand a file to disk, run it and recompress after running when
the file never change at all?!?  Econ, wake up!

    ___ \   ___  / ___  ___/ |         / | David Ong Tat-Wee
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______/ ______/    __/      ___/ ___/    | Try the DOTW Demo for the IIgs!