01/29/96 MEET THE NEW OFFICE PARTY POOPER

MEET THE NEW OFFICE PARTY POOPER

FULLY 23% OF computer game players use their office PCs for their virtual fun, according to a market survey by Coleman & Associates. But DVD Software in Irvine, Calif., thinks it has the solution for keeping employees working instead of playing at work.
Its UnGame software seeks out and eliminates computer games--such as the Solitaire and Minesweeper included as part of Microsoft's Windows 3.1 operating system--from any IBM-compatible PC. It works by looking for specific ``signatures,'' or patterns of programming code, in the files stored on a hard drive and compares them to a database of known computer game file signatures. That way, even if a clever employee hides a computer game by changing the name--say, from ``doom.exe'' to ``dome.exe''--UnGame can still find it. One official for a large oil company claims that UnGame found all the games files that were hogging a lot of space on one of the company's network file servers which stores data for over 400 PCs.
A trial version of UnGame can be downloaded from online services or from the Internet. The complete version, with signatures of over 3,100 games, is available from DVD for $60.
By Paul M. Eng