Product Reviews

Despite Apple's endeavours to have us believe otherwise, the Mac OS is still not totally up to scratch when it comes to file swapping between the PC and Mac. File transfers of anything other than the norm - those with Windows 95 filenames or those which are delivered to the Mac on non-floppy media - can't be recognised by PC Exchange without extra help. And with the increasing popularity of Zip, Jaz and EZ removable drives on computers of both platforms, this problem isn't going away.

However, if you can't wait for an update to PC Exchange there are a few solutions, and none more complete than DOS Mounter, a tried-and-tested Mac utility which now adds full support for Windows 95, and its companion utility for PC users, Here&Now.

DOS Mounter 95 is actually a combination of three utilities. The DOS Mounter 95 control panel does all that PC Exchange currently does, and then some. MultiMounter is an extension that allows DOS-formatted disks and cartridges to mount on a Mac's desktop. And MultiFormatter lets a Mac user format and partition removable

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media in DOS or Mac formats. Unlike PC Exchange, the DOS Mounter 95 control panel is preset to map several common PC file extensions to Mac programs.

If the program you want to read a PC file in isn't in the default extension map, you can modify the map to suit. Overall, operation is seamless. You insert a floppy or cartridge, the utilities mount the medium and the file icons you see are those in the map.

Over on the dark side of computing, PC users needing to handle Mac-formatted media have similar compatibility and seamlessness with Here&Now. Files can be copied and renamed within Windows 95's My Computer windows, which means that they can feel (almost) at home with a drag-and-drop interface. Extension mapping is performed by the Here&Now applet, which operates on the PC in a similar way to DOS Mounter 95 on the Mac. While you can format floppy disks to the Mac HFS standard using Here&Now's floppy formatting utility, you can't format removables to the Mac standard. As if to make up for this, you can access all types of removable media, includingMac-formatted CD-ROMs.

There's nothing ideal about having to swap files between a Mac and a PC. DOS Mounter 95 is just one of the best ways to access PC files if you have a Mac, and Here&Now is the only method I'd choose to access Mac files on a PC. It's not essential to have both utilities involved in any one file swap between computers - DOS Mounter 95 on a Mac, or Here&Now on a PC, will do the job alone - but having both utilities installed on respective computers ensures that files can always be swapped, even when the wrongly formatted medium is accidentally sent.