Minutes of the Meeting held 12 June 2001


A fairly short list for a slightly rainy day and there were slightly
fewer people than usual.

MervC took the chair and I was deemed to be note collator. Herewith is
the list:

1) Save password - Manfred

2) pdfFactory - Jeff
Jeff writes: I raised this topic after having a go at pdfFactory from
www.fineprint.com  recommended by Graham and others at the recent
Southside meeting. I can only agree that it is a great little program.
But I do not know why I need it. Owen reported for example "I use it
for printing everything off the web now, bank receipts, manuals and
the like", but I do not understand why it is necessary to convert to
*.pdf.

There were various suggestions of uses at the meeting, such as it
converts a file into an immutable form, and I hope others will report
their suggestions for this query.

3) CD R/W. Tray not opening - CharlieK

Charlie reported that the tray of his Ricoh 7060A CD Burner would not
open if there was a CD R/W disk inserted and being used as a
supplemental disk storage area.   Works OK if a CD is burned (and
closed) as either a data or Audio CD using Direct CD or Easy CD
Creator (full version).

It works OK if a read only CD or a CD-R is used however the eject
button will not work with a CD R/W -even if only used to read pre
written data.

Right clicking and using the eject option does not work either.   Use
of third party programs to eject has not worked either.

4) Monitor colour - KenM

From a week or so ago my monitor would get a lemon colour overlay.
This may only occur a few times a day and lasts five to 10 seconds.
It was suggested that the monitor cable or card was slightly loose or
a pin was bent or the cable had a dodgy wire..  

Ensure that all connections were secure and the problem may go away.
Will try that and see if problem is solved. 

5) a) Follow up on RAM
    b) What are good programs for recording / writing from vinyl
         records to CD - MobyJim

"RAM Upgrades for Older Processors.
I raised at earlier meetings whether earlier pentium processors would
benefit from an upgrade of RAM to, for example, 128MB. My query was in
the context of an item in an article by Darren Yates on Upgrades in
June PC User magazine, and a comment in the review in the latest 16
Bits of Scott Mueller's 'Upgrading and Repairing PCs'; plus whether I
should put some more memory in my sister's Pentium 200 MHz MMX machine
(which now has 32MB SDRAM).

Mueller has quite a discussion on the the Intel chipsets that were
used over time for earlier pentiums, and their features and
limitations. He comes to the conclusion that because some of them
could only cache up to 64MB of main memory, if more than 64MB of RAM
is installed, performance would suffer 'greatly'. Don't ask me to
explain the technicality of this!

My course will be to try to find out what chipset model is used in my
sister's machine, and be guided by Mueller as to how much more SDRAM
to install. 

Mueller's book is in the Coffee and Chat library and thus available
for loan. A very readable and wonderfully detailed book!"
JimD
=========

Thanks all for the responses

Trevor


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