Coffee & Chat Meeting 16th May 2000 at Belconnen. About 50 people attended. Chair Ted A new young member from Mawson was welcomed. Merv and Ted offered themselves as link persons as they lived on the south side. 1) John. South side CNC & Mailing List. First meeting on 9th May was attended by over 20 people. However the room at Weston Creek Community Centre was booked up for Tuesday 23rd May. Details of next S'side Meeting will be published on the tip.coffee-chat newsgroup. Mailing list. Everyone who has an e-mail address on the Belconnen CNC list is now on the S'side Mailing list. 2) Ted. How to Maintain your PC article was mentioned. A list of things to do every day, every week, every month and at the beginning was circulated. The article was taken from the USA PC World Magazine, January 2000 issue on page 154. Allan pointed out that Chess and Gordon held a Training Day on this subject on Sunday 7th May and he took the opportunity to stress that Tip newsgroup do not want binary attachments sent to them. This is for safety reasons 3) Ken. Backups. Ken said each Saturday he backs up his C Drive to a removable drive. It was agreed that Norton's Ghost was a good programme for copying from one hard drive to another hard drive. Merv said it will mirror your files. Charlie said there is a trial version of Ghost available on Norton's Web Page. 4) Jim. Mouse and download. He uses a 486 Gateway computer but his 3.1 DOS has no Mouse Files. Various new mouses bought from the markets and Big W costing between $25 and $27 were discussed. Ted uses a " Columbia Additions" mouse bought at Woolworths for $27 but can be bought at the markets for about half that . It has a side button which uses software that allows automatic scrolling in two directions. It "scrolls without scroll bars!" as the box says. It also has a zoom facility and two scrolling wheels as well. The mouse is smooth and light Download. Normally Jim only loads text files but wants to load a Crossword from the Washington Post newspaper. Then remove it when he has finished. John S. said first to virus check, then download following details in Introduction to the Internet on his web site. Charlie said that links generated can then be removed by using EZICLEAN. 5) Terry Netspeed is a web service. He recommended checking conditions very carefully when buying a package from this ISP. Some items don't seem to be in the fine print but he could be wrong about this. 6) Al. Reassignment of keys. He uses two languages in WIN98 and wishes to reassign certain keys. The" ." and the "," Merv said go to keyboard/control, Languages/add on list, then apply it. 7) Joan. Printer Paper Feed. Every so often her Canon 4300 jams with more than one sheet of paper. Suggestions to cure the problem, were to have less paper in printer, clean rollers with solution isopropyyl alcohol. ? available from Dick Smith or make sure paper is loaded in correct way. The paper itself or even moisture in the air may be the problem. Many of us have this problem sometimes. 8) Ted T. A Gedcom/"Personal Roots" Genealogy programme available from Grace Bros. for $19.95. It was strongly recommended by a number of members present. "Brothers Keeper" also a good programme. Gedcom is a universal data exchange format for genealogy files. Charlie said that this can be used overseas in even with another language 9) Allan. Tip advised that it was agreed at the last meeting to buy a new computer server. Also gave Web site www.parentline.act.gov.au. This is the ACT Government's new Parentlink which is a great back-up service for parents. 10) Rod - Has bought a Torque wrench. Nothing to do with computers but he wanted advise on setting the torque on the wrench. John advised. 11) Bob S. 8GB removable HDD's. Wants to buy a removable hard disc drive for less than $300. John S advised him to buy any hard drive and install in a cradle. Ken said to buy a Laser 2700 cradle, with a fan at about $22. The new drive becomes D drive when installed, also buy more than one cradle to use for backup. Backup when off-line and keep the removed drive in a separate location for safety sake. Another member said when installing the new drive that it must be made a slave and not the master rive. 12) Mike D. Has just bought a new Celeron CPU computer. The Kingston dealer advertised a computer with 8.4 GB drive. Mike asked how much extra for a 13 GB drive, the dealer quoted $30. The computer has everything on the mother board. The modem and the sound board are built in. That can't be altered. He thought that the graphics speed was not as fast as he was used to. 13) Chris D. Has tried unsuccessfully to get copy of the small Windows 98 POCKET BOOK. George said he had seen one at the Kaleen Newsagency in the last few days. Sometimes they are temporarily out of print. Alan said that he e-mailed the APC company and that resulted in a copy being sent to him when available by the publisher, free of mailing costs. Notes by Maureen ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat pages are available on the PCUG Internet news group tip.coffee-chat. Archives of past meetings are available at the web site: http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/c&c.htm These Archives are searchable, and also include some minutes of the Internet SIG, that runs on alternate Mondays Coffee and chat now has a South side (usually Weston Creek Community centre) as well as a North side (Belconnen PCUG rooms) meeting place. All are welcome to either meeting. The South side meeting starts at 10 am and is held in the alternate week. *******************************************************Return to the Index or the Coffee and Chat Page