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TimesTwo : saves you money



Author: Scott Ohman
Date: June, 1994
Keywords: Golden Triangle Computers disk compression review software utility program autodoubler stuffit
Text: As every user who has had their Mac for more than about two days knows, you can never get enough hard drive space. On the other hand, few people can afford to go out and buy a new drive just to save that Photoshop picture or load the newest Sierra game. When this problem comes up, many people look to compression utilities. TimesTwo is such a program. There are two basic ways to compress your data to try to squeeze more space out of your hard drive. These are file and disk level compression. Disk level is represented by programs such as AutoDoubler. File compression utilities work like Stuffit, which most modem users should be familiar with. They compress and decompress files automatically each time you open or close them. They can squeeze extra space out of your drive, but the time lag involved in opening and closing files and launching programs can get annoying. TimesTwo works on a different principle. Instead of compressing files, it seems to ''trick'' your hard drive into thinking it has twice as much space as it really does, by the use of the file manager and TimesTwo driver. The way it actually works is of course a little more complicated, but this explanation should suffice. TimesTwo comes on a single disk. Loading it is a fairly simple, straightforward process, although you will need to devote a little time to it. On the 160 meg drive in my LCIII, it took roughly a hour to completely install and prepare the program. Most of the time, the program was working on it's own; I was off getting coffee. One useful feature of TimesTwo is the ''Magic Boot'' option which allows you to set aside a portion of your hard drive much like an emergency disk; with a system file, disk recovery software, and the TimesTwo driver. This small partition is normally not visible, but you can boot up with it by holding down the MB keys at startup. It is just like an emergency disk, except it can be any size you specify. One of the most important questions with a file compression utility is how much does it degrade performance? I found the company's claims to be true. There is no long lag in launching programs or opening files, such as one associates with traditional file compression schemes. On the other hand, I did notice a general slowdown of operations, particularly in booting up the computer, and in activities such as scrolling. Another question - exactly how much space is gained? Accord-ing to the manual, most users will experience a 65-85% increase; text files will compress much better than graphics files. On my hard drive, I saw my space expand from 160 megs to just over 300 megs. The final question - is the product worth using? You must decide if the extra space gained is worth the modest amount of performance lost. TimesTwo has a street price of $88.98, according to a recent MacZone catalog. To add the same amount of hard drive space that I gained, (140 megs), would have cost me $200-400 dollars. So TimesTwo fits my needs well. TimesTwo is published by: Golden Triangle Computers, 11175 Flintkote Avenue, San Diego, CA 92121-1203 619/587-0110

Copyright © june, 1994 by Scott Ohman


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