On solid ground -- Car Disk

["Eric H." <ejham@xxxxxxx>]

Wow...computer talk! I feel truly at home in this as it's my
biz.

I've got the Car Disk CD for my GTV6 (Bill has my reprint,
Valco-sourced GTV/Milano manuals that I sold with my
Milano...another story, another time) and they are all saved
in the absolutely worst possible graphics format for
computers: BMPs...aka 'Bitmaps.' This is irritating as it
takes a whole CD to hold what can easily fit on a computer
HD. What to do?

If you own a Car Disk, get a program called 'I_View32' which
is available as Freewear from the bigger download services
(i.e.. www.download.com or www.shareware.com ) and use this
program's convert feature to turn these enormous bitmaps
into JPG ( aka jpeg ) files. Huge files become tiny. The
best part is that I_View allows you to do the conversion en
masse...just select all the BMPs on the CD and convert them
to JPGs on your hard drive in one step.

Now the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good part is that JPG's are supported on just about
every computer type, usually through your internet browser.

The bad bit is that I_View32 is a Windows-only program, but
take heart Mac users, Aladdin Software (the people who
brought you file compression) has a similar shareware
product that will work for you...check their web-site for
more info.

The ugly part is that because of the way the Car Disk folks
named their files, they will come up out of page order if
you look at them in a folder. The page numbers will present
themselves in order if you rename them using zeros where
appropriate. For example: in my GTV disk, the tuning manual
page 2 was called 'S10ec2' which made it appear right before
page 20 (which is 'S10ec20') when you looked at the files
alfa-beticaly...but if you change the name to 'S10ec02' it
will rise to the top of the list. So, change all the names
and you're all set...it just takes a while to make all those
changes. The name changing can be done automatically on PCs,
but only with additional software and I really don't have
the time to describe the complexities here. Mac users could
use QuickKeys or somesuch to do this. Your best bet is to
turn on the TV, scoot the PC within range, crack a beer and
start manually renaming the files in the manual you really,
really need to use.

I have no clue if I helped anyone at all with the above
ramblings, but -- correct me if I'm wrong -- sharing my
experiences seemed like the right thing to do.

- - Eric H.
1983 GTV6 complete with rust in the usual places

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