The last meeting for the year was very well attended. It started off
with a few notices,

There will be a VCC next Tuesday, 17 Dec 96
The next VCC after that will be 14 Jan 97
The next real C&C will be 21Jan 97
The PCUG Centre will be shut from Xmas to 10 Jan 97
Ted Macarthur has produced a Name Tag kit, it will be left in the
Sixteen Bits cupboard, so if you forget your name tag, you can
instantly make a new one.
Stuffers are desperately wanted for next Monday night, 16 Dec,
stuffing starts at 5.00pm, and hopefully finishes at 8.00pm

Problems
	Pam gets her photos on disk, there is a small program that comes with
it and this enables her to view the photos on the computer, however
when she comes to print out the photo, she gets an "Out of memory"
report despite having 16 megs of RAM with her W3.1 machine.
.
	The most likely cause was that there was insufficient conventional
memory and she was advised to run MEMMAKER, further advice suggested
that she make a permanent swap file, and to do this, go to Control
Panel, 386 Enhanced, then Virtual Memory and do whatever it suggests.

	Vernon had a Microfax Fax/Modem, a small device which works
fantastically as a fax machine, but as a modem, it was a dead loss.
Nominally 28.8K, it would only work at 19.2K, and it was suspected
that it was something to do with an RPI chip set. It does not accept
all standard Hayes instructions, and those instructions it does not
understand causes the modem to lock up. Be Warned.

	A lady, whose name I missed, had just bought a Maestro modem, and the
first piece of paper she took out of the box read "Disconnect when not
in use". How can I receive faxes when it is disconnected? she asked.
Well this stirred the masses, there were endless horror stories of
modems, answering machines, and phones being blasted away from strikes
of lightening.  

	Did you know that 27% of all phones on the South coast need replacing
annually, and most of these replacements are due to lightening
strikes. There is very little you can do about this, other than pull
the plug out when storms threaten. However, the second likely cause is
when your 240V or 11KV line snaps and falls on your telephone line
sending heaps of voltage into your modem. This can be prevented with
surge protection devices, but is very unlikely to happen. 

	Don Nicol reported that a flakey A drive problem he had been wrestling
with was solved by shortening the length of the cable. An interesting
solution.

	Peter Hodge could not contact TIP after reinstalling W95. He is not
sure why, but uncompressing the Hard drive allowed him to get going
again. This lead to a lively discussion on compression with Darrell
Burkey singing the praises of DriveSpace 3 which comes with either W95
or the Plus Pack.

General

Snappy Video Snap Shot

	Mike Dinn displayed few printouts that had been created from a $450
device called Snappy, a video capture system which lives on the
parallel port. This is really amazing stuff considering the price, and
one is left wondering what will be around in a years time.

Two lines for the price of one (almost)

	Darrell Burkey advise that he has now two phone numbers for the same
line, and the $100 DSE Gizmo box he bought to decode the different
rings, works perfectly. It's $4 a month to Telstra, and highly
recommended for those that want an extra line for their fax without
actually paying for an extra line.

	 New fax machines being sold are likely to include this gizmo device,
so if you are in the market for a new fax, keep this snippet of
information in the back of your head.

	Emil advised that after a lot of hassles, he got a DSE scanner for
trialling, an OpticPro, retailing for $399, but likely to be $350
now.. It runs on the parallel port and is a very good machine. The
supplied software is a bit yukkie, but it was Twain compatible, and
PSP and Omni pro worked just fine.


	That was more or less it for the day, don't know if I will be around
next year to write notes of C&C meetings, so for all my regular
readers, here's seasons greetings and catch you in cyberspace another
day. Been a great few years with the C&C mob, enjoyed the company, the
coffee and the chat.

Owen

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