From: paul@tct.com (Paul Levin)
Subject: Review of the CMS Trakker 250
Organization: TC Telemanagement, Clearwater, FL
Distribution: usa
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 15:28:50 GMT

I recieved my CMS Trakker 250 on Friday, and used it on Sat. and Sun.  
Here is my review.

Lets start with Treasure Chest Peripheral (see ads in Computer Shopper),
from whom I ordered the Trakker on 12/8.  They told me I would receive it
on 12/18.  I arrived home at 7 PM on Friday 12/18 to find no Trakker.
I called Treasure Chest, who said they had shipped it on the 17th.  I was
very angry.  If there was going to be a delay in the 'ship to arrive
date', they should have called me.  At 10 PM my wife had me look out the
front door to find a wasp nest she had seen by our porch.  I didn't
find the nest, but I found a large box -- you guessed it, the Trakker.
We had been home from 7 to 10 that night, so I don't know why UPS didn't
ring the bell.  Mine is a safe neiborhood, which is why UPS will just
leave packages by the door, but at 10 PM, it could have sat out all night.
What if it had rained ?!!  I need to call UPS and talk to them about this.

I had called CMS before ordering the Trakker, so I knew that it came with
all required cables, and NO tape.  No problem, I had ordered 2 tapes
from MEI-Micro (again see Computer Shopper ads) at $14.97 each.  They had
arrived last Wed.  Well, it's late (10 PM) but let's check this think out.
What's this !!??  The software is only on a 3.5" diskette.  I only have
5.25" drives.  Sat. morning a local store allowed me to copy the files
to a 5.25" diskette.

Another side note, I was really overwhelmed by the size of the box in which
the Trakker was packed.  It must have been 2 feet by 1.5 feet by 1 foot.
The Trakker itself is only 1' x 5" x 3" (my guesses by memory).

I skimmed the documentation.  There didn't seem to be too much complexity
here.  Let's give it a go.

Running DOS, I installed the software.  It turns out that I have 2 
uni-directional parrallel ports, or so it says.  (I never knew that.)
It installed with no trouble, so long as I used the default drive and
directory destinations.  (When I would specify a different directory, the
install program would die.)  

I formatted one of the tapes.  It said it would take 1 hour.  It took 1 hour,
2 minutes.  Not bad, not bad at all.  I backed up my D: drive, which
had about 40 Mbyte of stuff (almost all of it non-compressed, with a few
.zip and .zoo files around).  It said it would take 5 minutes.  It 
took 10.  That test was run with compression, optimized for time.  My 40 Mbytes
of HD stuff took up only 26 Mbytes on the tape (out of the total 120 Mbytes
on the tape).  They recommend that you compare the tape to the HD, so I did.
Again, it said it would take 9 minutes.  It took 19.  There were no errors.
I had similiar times and sizes for my C: drive, which contained DOS and OS/2.

Actually, there were errors on the compare.  The OS/2 hidden files that have
spaces in the file name, where written to tape, with no spaces in the name.
Upon compare, the file could not be found on the hard disk.  These errors
are of no concern to me.  NOTE that only FAT partitions can be backed-up,
since the Trakker software must run under DOS.

By the way, the feature of giving estimated time, even though it is off 
by a factor of 2, is great.  It also gives a 0 to 100% progress line, 
which is also an excellent feature.

I tried to restore a small directory (about 15 files, 40 Kbytes).  It was
done in under 2 minutes.

I tried the Trakker software under OS/2 in a VDM.  It hangs.  Oh well,
they said it wouldn't work, and it doesn't.

Conclusion:  I'm very happy with my Trakker !!!  Just give me software
	that will run under OS/2.
-- 
From:  Paul Levin   paul@count.tct.com   813-532-2239 (work, 9-5 EST)
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