Minutes of C&C Meeting 11 November 1997

Co-ordinator Alf opened the meeting by welcoming all members,
including Eddie.  He said that the Group would keep silence at
eleven o'clock as a mark of respect to those who had sacrificed
their lives in war so that we could enjoy peace and freedom
today.

Wolf circulated a card from Guy Sturesteps thanking the Group for
the flowers sent in sympathy at his recent loss.  

Wolf thanked everyone who had helped with the Melbourne Cup
lunch, and Alf mentioned specially the contribution of spouses.
Wolf reported that the Melbourne Cup lunch had cost $50.10 in
excess of contributions, due in part to the purchase of glass
containers which would be used at future functions.  The Group's
assets now stood at $437.-.  

Mike had bought a 233 MMX computer for $1 700.- at Bytes in
Kingston.  The deal included a 2.6 gigabyte disk, 32 megabytes of
RAM, plus a very good 15 inch Acer monitor.  A Flight Simulator
98 bought from Harvey Norman turned out to need a 4 gigabyte disk
to operate it, so he returned the goods.  He noted that Microsoft
had a patch to fix this problem.  With Merv, Mike had recently
spent six hours trying to get the Ethernet program to link an old
and a new computer.  Before this can work properly, an up-to-date
version of Windows 95 is needed on the old computer.  

In answer to Neville's question, Owen confirmed that if you go
through a non-TIP Internet service provider, you cannot get
access to TIP newsgroups.  (TIP has a firewall barring
out-of-domain users from entry).  People who
live out of town can receive a mailing list but can only
contribute by getting someone else to send their message.
Neville said that John from Cooma would like to keep abreast of
TIP newsgroups, and John Saxon offered to send him e-mail
instructions on how to subscribe.  He added that Majordomo
software could give access to all TIP newsgroups.

Jeff asked why his computer would stop and start again for no
apparent reason.  The Group concluded that this was a heating
problem.  Emil described the structure and location of two kinds
of fans, one for the chip, the other for the computer itself.
John said that some dealers were using chips designed for a lower
clock speed and/or re-labelled at a higher speed.  Where such
chips were installed, the CPU would protect itself from
overheating by cutting out:  Jim agreed and advised users to buy
the best.  Neville noted that heat was the biggest destroyer of
electronic equipment so it was essential for fans and vents to be
effective.  John said that badly designed fan systems have been
known to cause more heating rather than less and you ended up
with an overall system which blew hot air through the computer.
Derek related how he had successfully cleaned out a
clogged fan with various agents.  Peter said that Intel
MMX-233MHz main boards have an automatic CPU temperature protect
switch.  Following several tongue-in-cheek comments about the
benefits of giving an occasional "thump" to a non-functioning
computer, Gavin reminded members that this was dangerous for the
hard disk.

Roger said he had had a problem with some programs failing on
boot-up or in use.  He had concluded that when several files were
operating from an MS DOS compatible mode, overall performance
could suffer.  In his case, his 32 bit computer, including the CD
ROM, reverted to 16 bit mode.  He said that there was nothing to
tell the user this was happening, so it was wise to look under
the performance tab occasionally to check for problems. John
said that the Wintune95 or 97 program, available from
www.winmag.com, would pick up problems like this automatically,
and suggest how to fix them.

Owen reported that the Partition Magic program was very good.  A
CD ROM was needed to operate it.

Anne related various problems she had encountered with her
motherboard and how these had been resolved.  Mike noted that
such problems were complex; in his view it was worth paying
someone else $50.- to fix them. 

Ken described a problem in getting identical format when printing
from Word 2, using a printer linked to a second, Word 6-based
system.  It was agreed that there must be some incompatibility in
the set-up of Ken's two systems which had gone unnoticed.  

Peter, using Internet Explorer 3, wanted to delete three out of
four cache files on his hard drive.  He thought the files had
been duplicated during reinstallation.  Mike suggested renaming
the files.

During a discussion of Internet cache files, Mike said that a
possible defect of Internet Explorer was, that it insists on
organising favorites alphabetically.  Twenty-five megabytes was
generally thought to be too large for a cache, though John
preferred to keep a large cache and read
off-line. However, pages such as the Sydney Morning Herald could
not be read off-line, because CGI scripts accessing pages lower
in the hierarchical grouping ran on the remote system.

In answer to a question from Elizabeth, it was agreed that you
can often ignore warnings that appear on the screen, and Jim
cautioned that such warnings do not replace an anti-virus
program.

The Group will consider possible venues for the Christmas party,
to be held on 16 December.  Coffee and Chat of 9 December will be
the last meeting of the Group this year.  John will coordinate
the next meeting of the Group.

JL 12/11/97  924

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