Comm/help
Chris,
You're quite welcome. 8)
As a general rule, you should use the fastest speed available to you when
downloading, and the slowest speed available when doing interactive things
like reading/replying to messages and on-line conferencing. Unless network
delays bog down your downloading, the baud rate rule-of-thumb mentioned
above will result in the minimum charges.
Backtalk is a very nice and freely distributable communications program.
It's available here in the Communications library (lib 5) as BT151.LZH.
A functional demo of Whap!, an automated CIS access program for the Amiga,
is available in the ATI section of the AmigaVendor forum. It will save
money for you by minimizing your on-line time for Forum messages,
downloading, and Compuserve Mail.
Almost all of the files in the libraries, including graphics files, have
been compressed by one method or other. LHARC is the most common program
used for this and is a good one to start with. Pick up the others as you
need them. In general, you'll need to decompress graphics files before
viewing them using the proper archiving program.
At the moment, I'm unaware of a program that will let you view on-line
graphics on the Amiga. There hasn't been much demand for this since most
of the graphic files are quite large in uncompressed form. It's much more
economical for people to download a compressed file and then view it
offline.
Try to get either Backtalk or Whap!, or some other program that will
support CIS-B+ or CIS-QuickB protocol as soon as possible. This will speed
up your downloading quite a bit, and won't make downloading large files
quite as painful. As to specific recommendations beyond that, I'd have to
know a little more about your setup and desired use. I wouldn't want to
recommend something that you have no use for, or something that wouldn't
run on your machine configuration. One program I can definitely recommend
to you now is the program called Switcher, which lets you easily swap
screens, even if you can't get to them via depth gadgets or the
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