From: ptb@prg.ox.ac.uk (Peter Breuer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.apps
Subject: Re: Stacker
Summary: ho hum - flame war time again!
Keywords: stacker, opinion
Date: 30 Jul 92 16:29:00 GMT
Reply-To: Peter.Breuer@prg.oxford.ac.uk (Peter Breuer)
Organization: Oxford University Computing Laboratory, UK

Hmm. can we keep the noise level down a bit please? I doubt if the
stacker people will sue, and your post is entirely reasonably phrased,
but I can see this leading to a lot less reasonable activity on the
net. Let's take this to email if we're going to offer commercially
damaging opinions.

In article <7178@ds5000.DAC.Northeastern.edu> pclark@ds5000.DAC.Northeastern.edu (Peter Clark) writes:
>My personal, and lots of people that I know, experience with Stacker has been
>that it has unexplicebly crashed, loosing all data in the 'stacker partition',
>it has been known to overload voice-coils on some hard disks (I've seen it 
>overload a coil on a Seagate), it has corrupted itself, and generally has
>created more problems than it solved.
>
>Of course, there are the cases where people have been running it forever and
>never had one problem with it, but I do not know anyone personally (out of
>15 people that I personally know are running it) who has not had a problem with
>it in one way or another (including version 2.0).

Yes. Well I'm one who has never had any problem. I probably could lay
my hands on another 30 people who I know personally in the whole world,
and maybe ten of those have pc's and 5 of those have stacker. And not
one has ever had any problem with it, nor anything but a good word to
say about it. Nor have I. Excellent utility, which I thank again again
and again. And I abuse it and the machine mercilessly. I'm afraid we've
discovered why statistics lie - everybody is an exception on the tail
of the distribution.

For the record,I've used win3.0a[enh] hyperdisk, EmTeX, matlab, qemm 6.02
lastbyte2.02, TurboC(++), Norton, PCtools (yep - there's a problem: my
copy comes from the times before >32M disks) and as many shareware
utilities as you're likely to find.

>The other thing to consider is what kind of data will you be storing on the
>stacker partition?  Pre-compressed files (.ZIP, .ARC, .ZOO, .etc) will NOT
>be compressed any further by using Stacker, so don't bother if you drive is
>really populated with pre-compressed files, it will just be a lot of time for
>negligable ammounts of space gain.

This is something to consider. But gaining anything at all is a bonus.
I only have a 21M drive, so I have a lot of trouble fitting things in.
ALL my executables are compressed with lze, and most data files are
packed away in ZIP archives until they're needed. So I only get about a
1.6:1 ratio out of stacker, overall. With 2M dedicated to a permament
windows swap file, and 3M left uncompressed for all the drivers and
devices I load into 128K of UMB at boot, plus some REALLY compressed
archives which make up my online manuals, I only have enough space for
a 16M stacvol, doubled to 32M. That's really 1.6x16M = 25.6M. Stats
tell me that I still have 5M of this free, and it contains my 200+
directories, full of fonts, windows stuff, editors, programming
utilities and whatever else you care to name.

The smaller the drive, the more you need stacker, IMHO.

>Just my $0.02.

I'm afraid I didn't get paid for this, and I wish I had. I just don't
see why one should try and actively HINDER other people from
benefitting. If only other people had been as altruistic towards me.

ATB  - peter <ptb@uk.ac.ox.comlab>