Minutes of the Meeting held 12 February 2002



Notes of topics discussed at the southside meeting of 12 February.

"1.   Life members.
      Allan Mikkelsen and Eric Fewster were inducted as Life Members of the 
      Coffee and Chat Group by Gloria Robbins (Our founder). Eric was unable to 
      attend and he was presented with his certificate at his home the following 
      morning.

2.   Encyclopedia.

3.   Windows XP
      -Roger reported on the procedures he followed for a smooth install
      of Windows XP.
      -Run checker and collect drivers/remove conflicts.
      -Partition first.
      -Clean up drivers/folders/programs (particularly Win98 specific
      programs such as Cacheman, Systeminfo, etc.
      -Deactivate start-up programs such as anti-virus.
      -Install WinXP.
        You can easily configure XP to look and function exactly as your
        Win98SE until you are happy with it.
        Download XP specific, critical updates and drivers (modem power on
        before boot-up)(game port loses programing ability)
        To tweak: www.totalidea.de for TweakXP
        For multimedia/imaging/etc - Microsoft Power Toys

4.   Phone calls via the Internet.

5.   The extraordinary case of the vanishing programs.

6.   Transact update.

7.   DVD Regions.
     Update from Emil.
      Almost all DVD on sale or hire in Australia have a series of
      built-in coding restrictions intended to restrict their use. One of those
      coding restrictions is the regional playback control. It is intended
      to deny the inter-region use of DVDs and hardware.

      For example, North America is in Region 1 while Australia and South
      America are in Region 4.

      The idea behind the restriction is to deny the use of DVDs and DVD
      hardware purchased in one region in another.

      However, the region restriction in some/many DVD players (standalone)
      and DVD drives (in computers) can be altered or removed altogether,
      either by software (mostly) or by hardware modification (chip
      flashing).

      Recently, the Australian Copyright Act was amended to include the
      so-called anti-circumvention provisions. It outlawed the manufacture
      and supply of devices or the provision of services which over-ride
      copy control measures.

      Following that amendment, Sony Australia sued a person who supply 'mod
      chips' which over-ride the region coding restriction (similar to that
      employed in DVDs) in their popular Playstation computer game consoles.

      The ACCC obtained the leave of the Federal Court to intervene in the
      case to support the supplier of the mod chips.

      The ACCC says that contrary to Sony contention, the over-riding of
      region-coding is not related to copyright protection but related to
      the protection of marketing arrangement. Hence, the anti-circumvention
      provisions do not apply.

      More in the ACCC media release dated 8 February:
      http://203.6.251.7/accc.internet/media/search/view_media.cfm?RecordID=595

      Moreover, The Weekend Australian carried a short report that the ACCC
      is liasing with its counterparts in Europe to investigate whether
      regional playback control is an unlawful trade restriction.

      The case in the Federal Court is yet to be heard. The decision of the
      court will have very wide ramifications on all sort of digital
      consumer goods.

8.   XLS files.

9.   Keyboard/Modem.

10. How to print a wide web page. 

11. XP Networking (John S).

    John remarked that on his original (XP over ME) installation, home
    networking (only 2 systems) was setup in about 10 mins with the minimum of
    fuss (including Internet access via the system with the Modem).
    But since his latest XP installation (XP over Formatted C:), Home Networking
    has been reinstalled 4 or 5 times without total success. The current
    situation is that some files/partitions and peripherals can be accessed from
    each machine but not all. Suspect sharing permissions etc - unfortunately
    the Network trouble shooting wizard and help files have not. Wish it
    wouldn't constantly advise to "contact the system administrator" - not
    terribly relevant for "home" networking.
    A quick poll of XP users indicated that no others are using home networking
    at this stage. RickG is using W2000 networking, but it seems from a rough
    Net search that 2000 is rather different from XP in this regard. We shall
    overcome.

12. W98 defrag (Simon).

    Having had problems trying to run defrag, after stopping every
    unnecessary program from running using EndItAll, and every few minutes getting the
    message that some detail had changed and defrag was restarting (Merv opined
    that Norton's was the probable cause), I searched the net and came across
    the following solution at www.windows-help.net/windows98/troub-29.htm

    "Problems running ScanDisk and Defrag

    1.  Go to Start>Run and type msconfig in the Open: box
    2.  On the General tab, uncheck all items listed under Selective startup
    (make sure that Selective startup is selected)
    3.  Hit apply and OK and restart Windows
    4.  This starts Windows with only the basics running; Insures nothing will
    interfere with ScanDisk and Defrag
    5.  Run ScanDisk and Defag, when ready go to msconfig and select Normal
    startup and restart Windows"

    For Windows 95, restart system and when you see Starting Windows 95...
    quickly press the F8 key. From the menu that follows, choose Safe mode, run
    ScanDisk and Defrag, then reboot.

    I have tried it twice and, apart from repositioning my desktop icons and
    resetting colours to default, I did not observe any other problems, but it
    worked,

13. Modem ISP."






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