Meeting 15 April 1997


	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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