Why use ACT?

The HP Palmtops come with a very functional suite of PIM applications, including an Appointment Book, and Phone Book. Since these are the primary functions of a contact manager, you might wonder why you need a program like ACT!

ACT! is a dedicated, integrated contact manager. All information is organized around the contact. That means that related memos, notes, address information, and appointments are all associated with an individual contact. If your life revolves around contacts, then an integrated approach may be more effective than a set of individual PIM's that you have to bounce back and forth between.

ACT! is a PC-compatible program. This means you can also run it on your desktop or notebook PC. If you want to use the same, full featured contact manager on your desktop and Palmtop, ACT! is worth looking at.

Installing the original 95LX version of ACT! (1.0) on the HP 100LX

Method 1: Launch ACT! with batch file

  1. 1. Transfer ACT.EXE and other necessary files to your HP 100LX.

  2. 2. Open MEMO and create the following batch file. (These instructions assume that you have ACT files on your A: drive in a directory named ACTFILES. If not, change the third and fourth lines to reflect the correct location):

@echo off d:\DOS\mode mono a: cd\actfiles act.exe

  1. 3. Use this batch file to launch ACT! 1.0 on your 100LX.

Method 2: Launch from AppManager using APLOAD

APLOAD is a utility that lets you customize the installation of DOS programs in AppManager. The latest version is available on the 1994 Subscriber PowerDisk. The APLOAD documentation file contains instructions for loading ACT! in AppManager. Set ACT! up as and application in AppManager and place the following APLOAD command line in the application's Path box:

a:\apload.com /4 a:\act act.exe\256

This loads APLOAD from the A: drive with a 40-column moon screen like the 95LX, and loads ACT from the A:\ACT directory with 256K bytes of system RAM reserved for it to run in.