PCHA5.RVW 930809 Comparison Review Company and product: Hilgraeve Inc. 111 Conant Ave., #A Monroe, MI 48161 800-826-2760 313-243-0576 fax: 313-243-0645 BBS: 313-243-5915 HyperACCESS/5 3.0 Rating (1-4, 1 = poor, 4 = very good) "Friendliness" Installation 1 Ease of use 2 Help systems 2 Compatibility 3 Company Stability 2 Support 2 Documentation 2 Hardware required 2 Performance 3 Availability 2 Local Support 1 General Description: Feature rich communications and terminal emulation program, but definitely for the advanced user. Comparison of features and specifications User Friendliness Installation I was surprised to find, given Hilgraeve's emphasis on virus detection, that the disks, five 360Ks and three 720Ks, were shipped unprotected. Installation, interestingly, is not covered in the manual. Amongst the ads for Compuserve, Dow-Jones, NewsNet, OAG and other goodies, is a flyer labelled "Quick Install Guide". The only information on the installation is that you run the INSTALL program. (Installation apparently makes no attempt to add to your "path": you are directed to change to the HyperACCESS directory before running the program.) The manual does, however, list the files supplied, and their functions, in Appendix J. Installation, due to the fact that files are shipped compressed, is a fairly lengthy process, taking 45 minutes on the old XT test machine. It is not very dependable, either, missing some of the options that it specifically asked me about during the process. The only information about the disk space needed is a comment on the card that you could install it to a 1.2 meg or larger floppy. The INSTALL program at one point gives you the option of a "full" installation taking up 1.1 megs of space, or a 400K minimal installation. Unlike some other programs which allow this kind of customization, you are only offered these two options, with nothing in between. In any case, it turns out to be nonsense. The program will not install if there is less than 1.5 megs of disk space available. I thought this might have been due to decompression needs, but, in fact, this is the size needed for a full install. Therefore, you *cannot*, in contradiction to both the documentation and the INSTALL program, install to a floppy disk. I am not sure what the minimal installation might be after you have deleted extraneous files, but I estimate it to be about 1 meg. Ease of use While beginners will find HyperACCESS reasonably easy to use, it is likely to be the "Power User" who is really interested in this program. There are a range of fascinating features, such as the ability to use the mouse to choose options from the screen, even on strictly text based systems. Hilgraeve obviously sees PROCOMM as the competition, and has followed, to a certain extent, the "one key command" philosophy. Not entirely; many of the HyperACCESS functions must be chosen from a menu. In certain cases, however, HyperACCESS has chosen a better route. Many of the "one key" commands are more intuitive (Alt-H for help, for instance) and the menu and screen layouts are more comprehensible. Unfortunately, many of the screens and functions are much less intuitive, and the program takes some getting used to. Once you start getting into the settings for various functions, this is definitely for experienced users only. One example: sending ASCII text. This is a fairly normal function, in that many users will compose a message "offline", and then send it to the BBS, email or text editing systems they are using on the "host" computer. Many "host" systems will present a "prompt" at the beginning of each line, and it is best to "wait" before sending the next line. HyperACCESS/5 has a feature to do so, and it is unthreateningly called "wait for this character after sending each line". However, the prompt character to wait for must be entered as a hexadecimal representation. (An "ASCII" character chart is provided. As usual, it covers not only the "proper" 7 bit ASCII characters but the 8 bit IBM PC graphics characters as well.) The script language, HyperPilot, is extensive and seems to owe much to the C language. The table of contents alone for the language reference chapter is three and a half pages of very dense type. Chapter eleven, however, does give a briefer overview of the more common commands. Once again, this is a compiled script situation. Scripts that have not been pre-compiled with be so after the first usage, if the proper files are all available. Help systems Alt-H is a "universal" help key, but this is another program where if you don't know the answer already, you are going to have a hard time finding it in the help system. Compatibility An interesting feature is the ability to "import" a Procomm dialling directory file. The program is also available for OS/2 and, in fact, is shipped with both versions on disk. VT terminal emulation is generally good. File transfer protocols are generally good, although there is a problem with Kermit uploading. Company Stability Hilgraeve, and HyperACCESS 5, has been around for a while. They have not obtained a great "presence" in the communications software industry. Company Support The usual. Documentation The documentation consists of one manual, plus the easily overlooked "Quick Install Guide" flyer. In general, the manual is clear and well laid out. (Small boxed "marginal notes" are sprinkled throughout the manual, and are generally very helpful hints and points.) However, it is at this point that the package deserts the "Power User". While the general information on how to use the program is all there, the details on many of the more interesting points are lacking. Many times, in reading the manual, I just got to the point where I felt the next few pages would give me an explanation of a particularly intriguing aspect of HyperACCESS/5, only to find that the next page was a new topic or chapter. The intermediate user will be easily able to grasp and use the basic functions of the terminal program; the advanced user is left wondering whether the experimentation necessary is worth the effort to see if a specific advanced feature lives up to its billing. System Requirements Must install to a hard disk. May be able to run from HD floppies if copied over. Performance HyperACCESS has a number of features not normally associated with terminal emulation programs. As mentioned previously, some of these, such as the ability to "choose" menu options, on "text only" systems, with a mouse, are minor but handy. HyperACCESS/5, like PROCOMM, has a "host" mode. The menus provided to the caller are not as pretty as those of PROCOMM, but the functionality is all there. Again, since it is "built-in", there is no need for programming on the part of the HyperACCESS user. The security aspects are also much better on HyperACCESS/5: there are multiple options which can be allowed or denied. One proviso - the program ships with an "unlimit" password which, as it implies, allows unlimited access. The "unlimit" password does not require a specific "account" name. I would strongly recommend that all purchasers delete this entry, even if they do not plan to use the "host" option. The most bizarre of HyperACCESS's features is virus checking. This is intended to catch viral programs, or infected files, as they are being downloaded. Note that there are the same limitations with this virus checker as with any other: compressed or archived files, or files otherwise manipulated for transmission, may "hide" viral infections. (HyperACCESS/5 does implicitly recognize this: another function is the ability to "unzip" ZIP format archives. This only works with PKZIP 1.1 format archives.) The READ.ME documentation states that HyperACCESS *is* able to find viral infections "inside" ZIP files, and I was able to generate a virus detection alarm with some very common infections that had been compressed with the PKZIP 1.1 format. The default, by the way, is that virus checking is off. I strongly suspect that "uploading" is not checked. (Hilgraeve used to "advertise" HyperACCESS/5 with a virus checking "copy" program called HCOPY. This is apparently still available on the Hilgraeve BBS, but I have not seen it on other boards.) A chapter is devoted to the additional benefits of "HA5 to HA5" communications; in other words, calling another HyperACCESS/5 equipped computer. This is primarily concerned with promoting the proprietary HyperProtocol file transfer protocol. Some mention is made of "time delayed" and "automatic" calls, but this can also be done with "normal" systems and the script language. Local Support None provided. Support Requirements The intermediate user should be able to access the basic features of the program. (Some problems with installation may inhibit initial use.) Even the advanced user will need to devote several hours, and possibly days, to the initial setup and learning more than the most modest features. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 PCHA5.RVW 930809 ====================== roberts@decus.ca rslade@vcn.bc.ca rslade@vanisl.decus.ca This message is in beta test. The real message should ship any day now ... Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER)