Another fine day with 30 or so turning up for a very informative meeting. First up was Wolf Lieske who warned about using a Vertical stackable CD storage unit, this one holds 80 CDs and if you are not careful, you can damage your CDs as Wolf found out. It was an excellent product, but be warned, do not try and press the CDs in too firmly. Derrick Boyd was worried about parity in memory chips. His current SIMMS have parity, but he can only buy non parity chips to expand the memory, did it matter? A summary of the thoughts of the group were; don't mix parity and non parity chips parity can be turned on and off in the BIOS and if you buy memory, ask if you return it if it doesn't work Doug Fry sent an email query; >A friend has a laptop computer - Toshiba 486 - which needs >a password to boot up. It was working well six months ago, >now when the password is typed and the enter key is pressed, >nothing happens. It does not give any message like incorrect password. The best guesses we had to this problem was; . The battery was failing . The bootup had reverted to the default password. So find out from Toshiba, what their default password was, Is there a record of the CMOS settings, can you get them? Replace the battery, or after bootup, can you get to the CMOS and short out the CMOS, pins 1 and 9, but check with Toshiba first. George Brunner now has a video driver/capture card, a Legend 64 MITV, he is very happy with it and notes they are now being sold by Dick Smith. The odd query he had of Legend was answered promptly. Keith Kloosterman had a problem about doing Screen Prints from W95. To cut a long story short, you can't do it from the W95 C:\ prompt, you have to restart your computer in DOS mode, but better still, just hit Screen Print, this copies it to the clipboard, then print from the Clipboard. And on the subject of Clipboards, Darrell Burkey gave a run down on some "secret" W95 programs, these were from Australian PC World, April 95 edition. For multiple clipboards; . insert the Windows 95 CD ROM . Select Add/Remove Software .Go to the Windows Setup tab .click have Disk .click Browse .go to (CD ROM drive):\other\clipboard .with the clipboard.inf file the only thing in the file name box, click OK twice .Check clipboard viewer .click install and you are off Start-Programs-Accessories Clipboard viewer. Where can I get my ribbons reinked?..well there is someone who advertises in the CT that does re inking at $6 a pop, they also sell ribbons, and will tell you if your ribbon is reinkable, however, no one could recall the name. What advantage is there for me to change from OLE 2.0 to OLE 3.0 ? Phew, well OLE stands for Object Linking and Embedding. As it turned out a program that the asker was trying to run came up with a message..."You need OLE 3.0", so that sounded like a good reason for the upgrade, otherwise the question was a bit beyond us. The Yardleys have transcended from the computer illiterate stage to the semi illiterate level, that cracked a virus with Norton AV, and feel pretty proud of themselves, and so they should be. This led to a discussion on viruses, "can I get a virus from the internet ?", and "does anyone use Thunderbyte ?".... it turned out that several did, and the several had disabled it because of problems. Fred (Pollum ?) had a 415 meg HD, with only 15 megs left, he was getting warnings "You are getting short of HD space, Fred, better do something about it". So Fred asked us and again thanks to Darrell Burkey who gave interesting advice about Drive Space, which is one way to go when you are running scared. Elizabeth Ward had a few problems, " you have an Illegal Action". She got this using Netscape, and swore that she had done nothing illegal. It turns out an illegal action is w95speak for the old and dreaded GPF, and quite common to have Netscape invoke it. Another problem was a message she got from Excell "We think you have copied something..." but it was hard to pin point this one, maybe a Help type message and she was asked to write down verbatim, any further error messages. The meeting was still going strong at noon when I had to leave to get out of the two hour park zone, so it was very interesting all round, the only snippet I gleaned, was that Wolf had been authorised to by a Zip drive for members us, so no doubt ,Wolf will report back on that next meeting which will be 29 April 1997 In the meantime, take care, and may all your computer problems disappear. Owen
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