[Q] I wondered whether WinLinks needs a special parallel cable. The story is as
follows: I purchased a laplink parallel cable (made by PC Accessories) from
CompUSA. This cable works fine with l2d / l2dmap (and the response is really
snappy as compared to using a serial connection). However, WinLink (and its DOS
counterpart WL) just get stuck in attempting to connect. Has anybody
experienced a similar situation? Is the WinLink cable different from the
standard parallel laplink cable? P.S.: I am running Novell DOS 7.0 on the host
(and yes, I unloaded everything except for the memory management stuff like EMM
and DPMS).

[A] I bought the exact same cable as you have (Actually, two; one at work, one
at home) and they work great. The only problem I've seen with WL.EXE (and, to a
lesser degree, WinLink.EXE) is that if I use, say, the serial connection at
115K to transfer to another box and then try to use the parallel connection to
the same (or even a different) machine, I have to:

      Start WinLink (without connecting to remote)
      Configure Comms to use LPT1:
      Save Configuration
      Exit WinLink
      Start WinLink

If I do this on both the local and remote machines, the parallel transfer works
fine; I can connect and transfer fine. BTW: Little known fact: You can run
WinLink (under WinDoze) and exchange files with a DOS machine that's running
WL.EXE. I couldn't get this to work for a while, and Compaq said it wouldn't
work, but after going thru the steps above, it does work. There seems to be a
bug of some esoteric flavor in the "connect" logic of both W*L* programs (I
suspect they share some "core" code.)

Actually, I really am not overly impressed with either of these products. I
like the fact that they're functional for a "Quick-n-Dirty" transfer to another
box, but in the main, I find that they are prone to hangage, lockage, and
buggage; especially when connecting to a really slow (386-16, for example)
remote. I get LOTS of transfer failures, both reading & writing.

For the most part, I use the InterLnk.EXE and InterSvr.EXE on the desktop I
connect to most. (You know, the ones that came with DOS.) I just put:
?DEVICE=C:\DOS\INTERLNK.EXE in my CONFIG.SYS and DOS asks me when I boot if I
want to load the driver; if I'm connecting to my "main" desktop, I tell 'im
Yes, and I'm connected! (I concede that this is probably a religious
preference; flames to /dev/null, please!)

What I'm most impressed with is the new "Direct Cable Connection" stuff that's
in Chicago/Win'95.... (What are they calling it today?) This lets me connect,
via the parallel cable, to another machine running Win'95 and use it as a
gateway to all of the network resources that the desktop is connected to. I can
use printers, local and network drives, CD-ROMs; whatever the desktop can see
on the network. Really slick.