Stac Electronics Inc promises the easiest MS-DOS 6.0 to OS/2 Warp conversion available with its new Stacker 4.0 for OS/2 and MS-DOS. It will convert drives compressed using Microsoft Corp’s DoubleSpace or DriveSpace to Stacker, enabling easy migration to OS/2 Warp. It reduces the conversion process to backing up and installing OS/2 Warp, according to John White, international marketing manager. The Carlsbad, California data compression king also claims to have broken the 2:1 compression barrier with its patented fourth-generation LZS compression algorithm and SmartPack technology, which now packs sectors as well as clusters. This would give a user with a 400Mb hard disk 1Gb of storage. This is especially pertinent to OS/2 Warp users who need to devote a ludicrous 35Mb to 60Mb of disk space to the operating system alone. The new version features the Stacker Toolbox from which many Stacker commands can be launched and which provides a detailed analysis of disk conditions, including alerting the user when a defragmentation or back-up is needed. A higher degree of security is provided, with read-write and read-only password protection. In fact Stac’s products have proven very popular in the past with drug cartels, such is the security of the encryption alogorithms. The barons’ files remained secret until the law enforcement officials requested the password to get in from Stac itself. Stacker now takes advantage of OS/2’s system cache, and operates up to four times faster than the original release. The AutoSave feature means that even after a quick disk format, the Stacker drive can still be recovered. The product is available now, priced at ú100 through the usual channels. Upgrades are available for ú50 directly from Stac in Britain.
