Paul described this program as a sort of continuing up date for your PC, which he demonstrated in detail throughout his presentation. It is currently available only for Windows 95/98, but will be ready for Windows NT 2000 and millennium support around January.

The program runs continually in the background on your PC, but does not require any external media. All changes made to the hard drive are stored on the local drive. The program typically sets up 10 percent of your drive for itself but it doesn't have to use that much space, especially on a large drive. It will work with drives that are from 10 megs to 4 gigs. Depending on the space allocated to this program, you could restore your hard drive to what it was at any previous point in time within the past couple of weeks. The more space you give it, the farther back it can take you. Virtually all PC users wish they could have used something like this at sometime or another.

Using his three questions as the basis for his discussion, Paul demonstrated how GoBack works and when we would most likely need it. Say, for example, you want to use a previous document as the basis for a new version, such as an updated fiscal report. You begin to enter the necessary changes and then save it, but, oops, you have written over the older document.

What do you do if you don't have a backup copy somewhere? GoBack will recover it for you. Using Windows Explorer, you can view every saved version of that file within the period of time that GoBack has saved your PC's history. You double click on the original document, and you have it back.

The new Professional Version, which the SPCUG was the first to see, has just been shipped and has a few features not in the Standard Version: multi-user licenses, password protection, the GoBack Drive Interface and Auto-Revert. Many of these features are helpful for instructional PC labs, for example, that have lots of users who try to make changes to the PCs. Auto-Revert allows you to automatically revert each computer in the lab to its previous clean state. You can even schedule it to take place.

Another feature, the GoBack Drive Interface, has several windows that can show you every event that has taken place in Windows in chronological order. This information may give you some insight into what may have caused your trouble. Another option is to create a "GoBack drive" that shows what the drive looked like at the time a change took place. This operation creates a couple of virtual drives in Windows Explorer. You can then drag and drop files or folders from the GoBack drive to the real hard drive. There is also the "file recovery window" that shows every file that has been created, modified, and deleted within the history's dates.

Restoring the Registry is also possible. You cannot delete the Registry, but installing new software can play around with it. The new application may work well, but something else, say the sound card or Internet Explorer, doesn't. You add and remove programs, but these still don't work. GoBack takes you back to conditions as they were before you installed the new application, and things are working as they were. Wouldn't it be nice if life were like that too?

To restore after an attack by a virus, you restart the computer. After the BIOS screen, the GoBack boot screen comes up, prompting you to choose where you want to go back to. If the first time is not far enough, you can choose to go back earlier. You simply "revert drive" to the point and time you want.

When you defragment the hard drive, GoBack keeps track of every change made in the process. In essence, if you wanted to, you could go back and undefragment your hard drive.

GoBack is strictly a software application, doesn't require a backup medium or saving to a network. Everything is done on the local drive. It is installed between the operating system and the hard drive and looks at how the drive changes, which is stamped with both date and time and saved in the history area. As the changes are made, it builds a list of them but does not build images, which saves space. GoBack is compatible with networks, however, and it could run on a workstation. There are also plans to produce a version for a network server.

The price at the SPCUG's meeting was $40.

[NOTE: Larry Clark bought a copy and installed it. See Listar, SPCUG Digest VI #107, 23 October 1999 for his comments.]

To get an idea of what members thought about the products he brought to show us, Jim asked the us to indicate with a thumbs up or thumbs down what our opinion was of each one.

When you buy it, the company configures it for where you live. You plug in the power, plug in your phone, and it automatically connects to the Internet. Your e-mail is already set up. It has a couple of problems: a 56K modem that is slow. When cable modems and DSLs are available, it will work very well.

Jim pointed out one of his favorite features on this gizmo: the "pizza key." Actual delivery seems to be a problem, however. He also noted that the pointing device is disappointing, but the company claims that you can add a mouse. The Eye Opener runs on Linux and has a pretty good screen, according to Jim. It also has a printer port but runs only Canon printers. It will add others down the road. It has a USB port on the back; some storage but not much; and will have an Ethernet option. The main screen has six icons: mail, Internet access, news, sports, weather, and finance. "Imagine the future: Make it wireless, carry it around with you everywhere," Jim suggested.

The "Eye Opener" is $200 and $20 a month with a two-year commitment to the Internet connection. Or you can buy the unit for $400 and get free e-mail and news. If you do have a computer and want to add this device as an extra station in your kitchen, say, you can have this and the computer on the Internet, and the company will be your ISP for $25 a month.

Something else for the kids is the rival to the Furby. It's called an Oogly and could just be a fine "example of technology gone horribly wrong," as Jim put it. When you pull its tail, it laughs strangely. The audience gave it the thumbs down.

Another interactive toy for small children is from Microsoft. It's called Actumates and lets kids hear sounds from things like a Teletubby. You can buy videotapes for it that talk to it and keep it responding. There is one for Barney and one coming for Yoda. The price for this is also in the $69 range.

If you want your kids to learn about music, Jim recommends Music Blocks. Different cartridges represent different parts of a song and different block shapes represent different instruments. One might be voices, another an oboe or clarinet. Kids can vary the sound with the blocks, and can arrange them in a number of ways. There is a similar device for learning languages as well. The price is $70 and new cartridges cost $20 each.

Another neat feature is an antenna cable that encircles the screen. It does not have a video output, a video capture, a floppy drive, or a PC card, but it does have a USB port and a single speaker. The outer shell is rubberized to prevent the computer from breaking if you drop it, but Apple won't give out the results of the crash test. Most of the audience gave it a thumbs up. After all, Apple has brought fashion to the world of computers. Cost: $1600.

The Visor, on the other hand, is a better handheld device. It's light and has a fair amount of memory (4 megs). It also comes in different colors, but it may not be as decorative as the I-Book. When the inventors of the Palm and the Graffiti left 3Com, they got permission to take the operating system with them, and this is the product they came up with. Most interesting, they extended the Palm's Springboard module. Cost:$150, or $225 for 8 megs. It costs an additional $30 for the cradle (USB) so you can connect it to your PC. This product got a thumbs up.

Telephones that connect to the Internet are hitting the market. Motorola has the I-1000s that use the Nextell network (available here). They have browsers, a really small screen: no downloading of graphs, only little snippets of text. A lot of phones on the Sprint PCS network have the phone.com stuff built in as well. Sending wireless data to telephones is going to be a big deal. Cost: about $200.00. Thumbs horizontal.

Jim also showed us the Tivo, a personal video server (a VCR of sorts) that has a very large hard drive (14 gigs). It lets you pause live TV, run a seven-second replay, play in slow motion, and record. You can tell it to record every version of "Seinfeld," "Kramer," "Fresh Gear," or "Screensavers," and it will record every single one onto the hard drive. The quality is virtually indistinguishable from regular TV. Prime time no longer matters. Right now, it holds four hours at the best-quality setting, fourteen at the lowest (which is awful, says Jim). You can also watch one program and record another at the same time and the replay does a 30-second skip, which is nice. Cost: $500 to $600, plus Tivo wants $10 a month for the service or $200 for a lifetime.

According to Jim, digital video recorders, wireless data, Internet access and Internet appliances are the latest things for this fall. In ending his talk, he told us to keep an eye out for a new technology called "Blue Tooth," which will allow all your devices-cell phones, pagers, computers- to communicate using low-power networking so you can have your own little personal area networking. Sounds like a computer revolution to me.