The meeting was held at the Irish Club, chaired by Mike D and notes taken by
Rod B.

After administrative matters were attended to, including the welcoming of
new attendee Rod P, the following items were raised and discussed.

1. Rod P noted that the appearance of email was not reliable in relation to
line ends and tabs. Email software varies in its methods of handling this.
Mike D said some programs allowed "word wrap" to be set. The appearance of
email and other simple text documents is often affected by the size of the
viewing window. As a mail recipient's preferences in these respects are not
often known it isn't usually worth the effort of making email tidy. If a
tidy document is needed it is better to send a formatted document as an
attachment, preferably in Rich Text Format (RTF, save as .rtf in most word
processors). Alternatively, if the recipients word processor (WP) is known,
then a document saved in the format of that WP can be sent. Most WPs can
open files created by other well known WPs, but older versions may have
problems. Bear in mind that the ubiquitous Microsoft Word is a notorious
carrier of viruses; hence the suggestion to use RTF. Some email programs
need to be told whether to send attachments in mime or bin-hex form. Mime is
preferred; bin-hex is usually only required for Mackintosh files. There was
some discussion of image attachments. The main recommendation here is not to
send too many attached to one email as it may then exceed the ISP's size
limit. John S suggested setting up images as a web page and sending the
recipient the URL.

Rod also asked about the online/offline switch in Netscape. This serves to
control only Netscape's ability to utilize an Internet connection and has no
impact on the availability of that connection. Many applications that
utilize the 'net can be set to run in offline mode thus enabling, for
example, the writing of mail without wasting network time, but this
application setting is quite independent of whether or not the system is
actually connected to the 'net. There was some discussion of offline viewing
of web pages. This usually requires access to the browser cache file either
through the browser's history function, or, in Internet Explorer (IE),
through storing the pages as a favorite (IE's spelling) for offline use. In
the latter case note that every time the browser is reconnected to the 'net
it will attempt to resynchronise these pages with a possible detrimental
effect on performance. Mike D mentioned CacheSentry as an effective aid to
browser cache management. Merv said that if a shortcut was set up pointing
to the history file, it could speed up offline viewing.

2. Anne L has a new computer. When she tried to access certain Corel
commercial image files with a Corel program she had used successfully for
the purpose on her old system, the new system complained of a missing
module, pcdscsi.exe. Despite a number of questions the meeting could not
resolve what the problem might be. Merv said that if Anne brought the
computer to him, it should be possible to sort it out.

3. John S raised a matter that is being discussed on the Coffee and Chat
mailing list: is that mailing list a valid place for discussions, or should
they be confined to newsgroups? Only about half those present use the
newsgroups and after some fairly heated discussion the meeting unanimously
requested John to continue the mailing list as a place for both
announcements and discussion.

John also had some comments about Transact costings. His view was that they
were only likely to be favourable if the initial offer was accepted. It
should be compared carefully with Telstra's ADSL offering, which, while not
guaranteeing such high speeds as Transact, looked fast compared to older
available connections and also included ISP services as part of the price.
Peter H has looked very closely at ADSL in relation to his current usage and
has decided that ADSL is the way forward for him.

4. Graham M had been doing some work on a friend's Mackintosh with an
earlier version of IE than 5. He was having trouble bringing up images and
was seeking system resource information with little success. No one present
had had recent enough experience of a Mac to offer really good advice, but
there was a suggestion that, for example, disc storage utilisation could be
discovered in a similar way to Windows (right click and Properties).

Graham also reported his use of a digital camera attachment for capturing
transparencies. He circulated printout from such an image capture, which was
quite impressive.

5. Brendan asked how to find out about MP3. The September issue of PC User
has some good information. Mike D said that a program called GoldWave can
create MP3 files. Codec software required to work with MP3 may need to
downloaded or extracted from the Windows CD.

Brendan also asked if a system must be up and running at the time when a
scheduled task was intended to run. The meeting confirmed that it was. Some
system BIOSes can be set up to boot at a specific time, but care and
attention is needed to arrange this.

Finally, Brendan needed to know how easily information can be exchanged
between different word processors. As mentioned in point 1, most modern WPs
can read one another's files. They can also usually save in a format
suitable for another WP using the "Save as" function.

6. Ted M, in information disseminating mood, said that he had recently
bought a video card and was pleased to discover that a rule of thumb
published in September PC User (don't pay more than half your CPU's MHz rate
for a video card - 266MHz=$133) vindicated his purchase. He advised members
to apply the rule and not spend more than was sensible noting that the
fastest graphics card wouldn't improve perceived performance if CPU rate was
low. In the ensuing discussion it was said that there were graphics cards
available for PCI slots and AGP slots on mother boards, the latter being
specific to graphics. Mike D mentioned that the fairly cheap computer he had
bought recently had an integrated system board incorporating a modem and
graphics processor. Not necessarily the best from a performance point of
view, but certainly cheap. The board in question had in addition a single
adapter position, which could use either a PCI card or an ISA card.

7. Peter H found that his Windows\temp directory was filling up with .gif
files that seemed to be related to Paintshop Pro. John S said that, provided
programmers were following conventions, no file in that directory was
essential to system function. As a result the contents of the directory can
be regularly cleaned out. Merv pointed out that some files Windows is using
at the time can't be deleted, but if the system is restarted in DOS mode
then they can be deleted, because then Windows hasn't got its hands on them.
There was also some discussion of zero length files in other directories. It
was noted that these are usually essential to some programs operation and
should not be deleted.

Peter also introduced some discussion of magazine CD programs asking whether
they should be installed directly from the CD. Many magazine CDs now have a
browser interface where selecting a program for installation brings up the
download choice of saving to disk or opening from current source. Since the
current source is already local in this case the recommendation is to open
the file, in effect installing from the CD. Peter also asked if there was
any way of keeping 30 day trial programs. Around the table there was a
chorus of "Pay for it".

8. Rod S continued his story from earlier meetings of his machine
experiencing a fatal exception on the first mouse click after boot. An
immediate reboot has so far always fixed the problem, but there was no
agreement about what the problem really was although several members pointed
the finger at IE5.5 recently installed by Rod.

9. Merv had some comments about Windows 2000. No other members either have
or were currently planning to install this system, so as time was running
out Merv did not expand on his comments.

Merv also mentioned a note he had received from a friend about
http://www.raf.mod.uk/bob1940/bobhome.html. This site has details of all the
60th Anniversary celebrations of the Battle of Britain.

10. Gavin said he was having difficulty accessing a particular web page from
his system and that other users he knew were not. John S recommended holding
down "shift" when clicking on the link so as to force a reload of the page
in case there was some cache problem.

It then being 12 noon the meeting broke up and many members retired to the
bar and dining room.




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