Meeting 13 March 2001



1.Picnic details - SHARE A LUNCH WITH FELLOW PCUG MEMBERS

Following Southside meeting on 27th March, we are  holding a picnic:-

TIME:        12.00
PLACE:      Barbeque area at EDDISON PARK,
                Launceston Street, Woden (Map available
                at meetings, 13th and 27th March)

PARKING: Opposite Phillip College, Launceston Street.
                (short walk)

Bring your lunch and something to drink - and perhaps a chair or rug.

Partners, friends of PCUG members are welcome
.
If required, a map will be emailed to you

QUERIES:  Contact Gloria (grobbins@pcug.org.au)

2.Admin -  Library JohnS said that it had been intended to have the meeting
in the big room, but the message hadn't got to the right people in the club.

He also asked if there was a volunteer to take his place at Woden library
while he is overseas. Mike D said he could do some of it.

3.Printing jobs "locked" - Rod P is having trouble in a W95 system with a
Canon 1000. Some suggested remedies were to ensure "pause" is off, check his
cable connections, check disk space and reinstall the driver by removing and
add the printer again.

4.House painting software - Can anyone recommend software which tries out
different colour schemes on a range of house designs?

One good solution is EzyPaint free software from Resene, a New Zealand paint
company.
http://www.resene.co.nz/itech/main.htm

This provides 18 house exteriors and 18 interior rooms, and the use of any
of 7 of the company's colour charts.  However, it is limited to typical NZ
house designs and involves a 20MB download (2 hours @ 28,800  bps - use a
download manager).

Other suggestions were:
* 3D house design programs from Harvey Norman (discounted) or the Computer
Fairs.
* Scanning in a photo of the actual house and colouring it using a graphics
program.
    Rod B suggested this method can be very fiddly when colouring scans of
photos of miniatures buses (???).

5.Modems in series - This probably means in parallel, which is quite
feasible, but means two physical links and probably two ISP ids. Not usually
worth the candle, rather use something like download accelerator which
attempts multiple connections.

6.Ghost - Darrell Noticed this item on our list and says: I built a new
machine last weekend and for the first time I needed to transfer data from
one hard drive to another to
preserve the existing set-up. Basically, I had a 10Gig drive in a machine I
was replacing that had all my software and set-up on it that I wanted to
transfer to the new machine I was building that I had purchased a 30Gig
drive for.

I was going to use Ghost to move the image of one drive to the other but the
cost was a bit much and I couldn't find a demo version. I also thought it
might be a bit difficult to use being such a sophisticated piece of
software.

A quick search of an online software archive turned up a program called
Drive2Drive and I must say that I was really impressed. Believe it or not it
copies drives from Windows with a simple wizard interface that anyone can
drive, it's very simple. Have a look at
http://www.fssdev.com/products/drive2drive/ for more information.

So I whacked the new 30Gig drive in the existing computer as a second hard
drive, downloaded Drive2Drive and ran the program. The unregistered version
will only copy exact partition sizes meaning I would have ended up with only
10Gig usable on the 30Gig drive. But I was so impressed with the product I
went ahead and registered it online for $US25 to get the added functionality
and it worked like a charm. It let me decide what to do with the extra space
and I decided on two partitions one of 10Gig and the other of 20Gig. Then
off it went and did the cloning of one drive to the other. Can't tell you
how long it took as I went out at that point to do some shopping (how's that
for confidence).

But the real surprise came when I put the new drive into the new machine.
Even though this new machine didn't have one piece of hardware in it that
matched the old machine, Windows came up and re-installed everything and off
I went with essentially the identical set-up that I had in my previous
machine. The only hiccup I had was that with the change of network cards my
system wasn't prompting me for a network login and therefore I wasn't
getting my own desktop and set-up. Once I realised this I found a white
paper at Microsoft that explained this was common and that correcting it was
as simple as removing a registry key. Once I did that I and was prompted for
my login again, the machine came back to my previous set-up and off I went.

It's always better to have a fresh set-up with a new machine but I had some
software that I could not replace or re-install on the original hard drive
so this was the only way. I decided to experiment as I hear about people
cloning drives all the time and in this case it worked out well. As they
say, YMMV (your mileage may vary).

7.Keyboard layouts - www.allhomes.com.au - This is a tip for persons who
compose documents in languages other than English.

Win95/Win98 has some 20 different keyboard layouts for European
languages. It is handy to know that you can add keyboard support for
the language of your choice in addition to the usual support for
English(USA) keyboard that most of us have , by going to:
  Control Panel - Keyboard - Language

You can then define a default keyboard as well as other available
keyboard, in a manner similar to defining available printers.

Microsoft used to print those layouts in the manuals. But alas it
appears that they have ceased that practice.

With non-European languages, it possible to find on the Internet both
the font support and the keyboard drivers for many of those languages,
as I did with a simple search using Google.

- - -

www.allhomes.com.au includes a useful database of sales of homes and
units in Canberra for the last 10 years. Searchable by suburb, street
name or street number. The results can be sorted too.

Some members at the meeting commented that while the database is very
useful, it may not include all sales, for example recent sales.

Has anybody come across any such database for localities in Australia
other than Canberra?

8.HDD controllers - Greg reported difficulties with seeing a CD-ROM. Members
suggested reloading bus mastering drivers and checking the CMOS battery.

9.Graphics - JPEG,comp.maps - Peter H said that JPEG files can be compressed
in Paint Shop Pro 6 by going to File, Export, JPEG file. This opens the
'JPEG Saver' dialog box. This
dialog box gives you a preview of your image both compressed and
uncompressed. It allows you to tweak the file size and view the result
alongside the uncompressed image. It also gives you a list of download time
approximations according to compressed file size and modem speeds.

10.TheTrip.com - Terry sends his apologies! It's theride.com not thetrip.com
which can develop a navigation map from anywhere to anywhere.

11.Outlook fonts - Charlie has received mail that doesn't display correctly
in his inbox, but is fine when he replies or when he moves the text to
notepad. There was widespread astonishment.

12.Customs & GST - Peter H said that it is possible to get a cash refund of
GST if you are
leaving the country carrying items purchased in the previous three months.
It is necessary to have  receipts, each in excess of $300, and to have the
goods with you as cabin baggage as you pass through 'immigration' at the
airport. For example if you are buying small items to take overseas at
David Jones get a consolidated receipt from DJ's office showing a total of
over $300 and also showing the amount of GST paid. On returning to
Australia the duty -free allowance is $400 per person. Goods on which you
claimed a GST refund on departure are depreciated while you are away.

13.Inktank - Eugen said that the Cartridge factory may be prepared to
purchase empty ink tanks. Mike D observed in passing that Office Works were
offering HP printers at such an attractive price they were a source of new
cartridges!

Notes by RodB
what you get used to, and if you want to tie it up to your bank.






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