Symantec's Gulliver's Travels By Kevin D. Cooke   In Jonathan Swift's tale, Gulliver sets out on a journey to strange and exotic lands that are filled with inhabitants of varying sizes, cultures and personalities. In the land of Lilliput, Gulliver is of normal size while the Lilliputians are a mere six inches tall. Symantec Corp.'s pcANYWHERE CE shares a similar story, as it runs on a handheld device a mere six inches long. Despite its size, pcANYWHERE CE does not belittle the demand for remote-access assistance. This small--but mighty--pcANYWHERE sibling offers the core set of remote-control features that are found in Symantec's 32-bit product. Code-named Gulliver, Symantec's soon-to-be-released pcANYWHERE CE will offer remote-control capabilities from Microsoft Windows CE-based handheld personal comp uters (HPCs), to Windows95 and Windows NT systems running a pcANYWHERE32 host. I tested an alpha version of pcANYWHERE CE on a 4-MB Casio Computer Co. Cassiopeia HPC. With it, I remotely controlled my Windows95 desktop system, along with one of our Windows NT 4.0 servers. I also tested three connection types, as I established sessions over the HPC-to-desktop serial cable, point-to-point connections and a TCP/IP connection. That's right--Windows CE offers a WinSock 1.1-compatible application programming (API) interface and dial-up connections. Non-Lilliputian in Power Like its bigger relatives, Win95 and NT, Windows CE supports Microsoft's Telephony Application Programming Interface (TAPI). However, a quick look at the Microsoft compatibility list for Windows CE shows that modem vendors have not been beating down the doors to obtain the "Designed for Microsoft Windows CE" logo--there are only 11 modem manufactu rers on the list (www. microsoft.com/windowsce/hpc/partners/hardwarelogo.htm). I began testing with a MegaHertz 14.4 PC Card Modem (Microsoft logo -compliant), but soon grew tired of the pokey performance (compression is not yet enabled in this alpha version). After searching through dozens of modems in our Manhasset, N.Y., lab I was unable to locate a faster modem that was also on Microsoft's compatibility list. Since I like to live life on the edge, I popped an unsupported Hayes Optima 336 V.34 card into the Cassiopeia and was blazing away at 33.6 Kbps without incident--well, almost without incident. It seems that power management of PC Card modems in HPCs has a long way to go. A fresh pair of AA batteries installed in my Cassiopeia lasted less than 15 minutes. Like the Lilliputians, pcANYWHERE CE is small. The memory footprint of the Windows CE OS is a little less than 500 KB in RAM, and the executable itself occupies less than 200 KB of storage space. Additionally, it is designed to run on even the lowest-end HPC with 2 MB of RAM. But don't let its size fool you; pcANYWHERE CE is a fully functional remote-control client. Traveling IT professionals and system administrators will love pcANYWHERE CE. In fact, this is the first application I've tested that establishes Windows CE-based HPCs as more than just this year's cool toy. Although its four-color, 480x240 monochrome screen is small, I was able to perform simple system administration and other quick tasks. After logging into my remote-access server, I established a Point-to-Point Protocol session and connected to the pcANYWHERE CE desktop host running on the NT server. This first release of pcANYWHERE CE lets you connect directly or via a dial-up connection.

Eicon DIVA Pro. 2.0 Hits All Right ISDN Notes by David Willis Updated March 7, 1997