| ★ APPLICATIONS ★ DISQUE ★ OPERATION CARETAKER ★ |
Operation Caretaker (Popular Computing Weekly) | Operation Caretaker/Operation Alignment |
In theory, this is an excellent idea — a care and cleaning kit for your cassette player (although not, as Global implies, for the computer). In practice though, I couldn't figure out what was going on or what it all meant when I had the program up and running. The kit consists of a head cleaner and demagnetiser tape, a small screw-driver for adjusting the head alignment (so far so good, both of these are good ideas) and a short program which checks azimuth alignment. It's the latter which causes problems, as there are no instructions at all to explain how this program works, or to explain what jargon like "azimuth alignment" means. The screen display consists of an animated bar graph with three columns, but there is no explanation of what the bars measure. Beneath the graph are five lines of text referring to the Read Status, Bytes Read, Read Errors, Speed and Sensitivity of (I assume) whatever data is being LOADed. Now though those headings might sound self-explanatory, the figures which accompanied them were completely confusing. According to the program, my cassette player, which has been completely reliable since I bought my Speccy in '83, is a complete wreck which apparently makes more errors than there are bytes in any given file. As I said, this kit is a good idea, but as it stands the lack of instructions and explantory notes make it very lacking in user-friendliness. C.J. |
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