You asked for commentary on the "Getting Started" column. I am sure you'll be hearing from novices such as myself on the subject.
Please do not drop the column, and keep it elementary. Not all 95LX users are programmers.
My field is law enforcement. As a cop, I need access to information on criminal suspects, their vehicles, m/o's, etc. I bought the 95LX (and sold my Casio SF-8000) thinking I was getting a wide-open memory bank of 512K to be used as I saw fit. Wow, what a letdown when I learned that such was not the case.
After reading some non-HP publications, including your paper, I find that each built-in application has limited memory.
Although I agree with one of your readers that a generic card file would be an ideal application, the Phone Book should be suitable for my purposes. Be that as it may, the 47K limit is less than I had in the Casio (64K). I know I can initiate different files within PHONE, but that is inconvenient & time consuming (the antithesis of what a palmtop is all about). I want one large PHONE file that I can access quickly.
I am somewhat confused about RAM cards. Would one solve my problem, or am I eternally plagued by the 47K limitation?
Bob McCarthy
Phoenix, Arizona USA
[You are eternally plagued by the 47K PHONE limit. Two solutions: First, it really is not that big a deal to divide your PHONE book into A-M and N-Z and to create User Defined function keys to switch between files (see last issue's Getting Started column). You can use the PHONE F9 Tag feature and Menu File Extract and then F3 Cut to create a second PHONE file and trim the original file.
Secondly, Lotus 1-2-3 may actually be more appropriate for your data base. The size of your Lotus 1-2-3 file is limited only by the amount of system memory you have set, which means you can create much larger files. Lotus has better sorting capabilities (Menu Data Sort) than PHONE. You can sort on name or type of crime or type of vehicle or whatever. You can search with the Menu Range Search command -- Hal.]