Minutes for the meeting held 22 Sep 98

Meeting 17 November 1998

 


Minutes of C&C Meeting 17 November 1998

Co-ordinator John welcomed 36 members, and started by conveying Joan's
thanks to the Group for the donation to the Cancer Society in memory of
Alf, who had found the meetings a great pleasure, the highlight of his
week.

John said that C&C would meet on 1 and 15 December, would not meet on 29
December, and would recommence on 12 January 1999.  Emil will advise about
the C&C lunch on alternate Tuesdays.  It was agreed to hold the C&C
Christmas Party in February 1999.  Wolf reported that the C&C Group was
well in funds.  

Allan asked for feedback on email problems as a new Spam-killer has been
installed and the new system could be blocking some messages.  

Topics covered included:

1. 	Freeware
2. 	Cyberian Outpost
3. 	Comparison of systems on offer in Canberra 
4. 	Spam tool
5. 	Machine from Hell
6. 	New terminology for files
7. 	Which modem?
8. 	Should we buy Ghost?
9. 	ICQ
10. 	Undelete function
11. 	Installing W98
12. 	Budget cartridges
13. 	PCUG AGM, Christmas party, new phones.

1.	Freeware

John recently installed (and can recommend) the following W95/W98 freeware:
	Diskdata Vrs 2.1 426Kb from http://www.digallery.com/diskdata/.  An
effective disk drive lister by folder and subfolder or file size (can be
printed or displayed in graphical formats). It showed that his Windows
folder had grown to 394Mb and that the Download folder was 306Mb!
	CacheSentry Vrs 1.22 build 109 from
http://www.mindspring.com/~dpoch/enigmatic/index.html.  We have discussed
this "fixer of MSIE Vrs 3.x, 4.x, 5.x cache problems" before [C&C minutes
22/9/98, #9].  This update also finds "broken page downloads" which are not
automatically deleted from the cache.
	CopyURL available from Tucows. A neat utility that adds 3 right click menu
items when an MSIE Favourite is selected. The extra items allow "copy
URL=http://www......to clipboard", or "copy link=code for the link to be
pasted into web page code", or "copy name=Link name plus URL to clipboard".
 Without this utility the normal favourite copy command produces a URL file
for attachment - YUK.

2.	Cyberian Outpost

John noted that "Cyberian Outpost" a USA East coast computer parts and
software supplier, lists about 120,000 items on their web pages at: 
http://www.outpost.com;  currently has free shipping anywhere in the world
(up to a max of US$100) till the end of Nov 98.  John took advantage of
this to order a 2mb Upgrade to his PalmPilot PDA. The price was US$109
(normal retail US$130) and shipping took 4days door to door including a
weekend.

3. 	Comparison of systems on offer in Canberra 

John also made a survey of systems around $2,000 from the Canberra Times of
7 Nov and circulated an Excel spreadsheet of results.  Eventually he
advised a friend to buy a Pentium II/333Mhz, BX chip set, 64Mb RAM, 4.3Gb
HDD, 8Mb AGP graphics, 15" Digital mon with integrated speakers, 16Bit "3D"
sound, X36 Artec drive for $1,575 with manufacturer's warranties + labour. 
The system was put together by Peter Sanderson, Ph 6242-6259 and is roughly
$300 cheaper than most shops around Canberra.  Peter assembles 5-10 systems
at a time at home, buying the components from Melbourne.  The logic used
was cost, and the fact that PC shops are only as good as the current
technician and tend to disappear - whereas someone who has a home in
Canberra may be around longer.  The system chosen was delivered last
weekend, is extremely fast and works well.

4. 	Spam tool

A frightening piece of Spam mail was circulated - itself a Spam tool,
offering 1 million Email addresses for Ł59 or US$99, and including software
capable of sending over 30 million emails per hour.  

5. 	Machine from Hell

John described fixing the "machine from hell" which was said to have "just
stopped working recently".  No boot, no video.  Taking off the case
revealed one screw in the motherboard, 3 screws between the CDROM, HDD, and
floppy drives (one screw in each), with hardly a thread on the machine that
was'nt stripped, and screws inserted at random.  All cables had been
disconnected and re-connected, also at random.  Many cable plugs were
offset from the pins (either lengthwise or crosswise) and "spare" pins were
sticking out at odd angles.

The cables were reconnected correctly after pins were straightened and
video was returned, but no boot was achieved from the HDD or floppy drive. 
The Multi I/O card was suspected (due the IDE loop back) and replacing that
restored normal working except in the floppy drive which contained the
cover of a FD inside the drive!  John extracted that, but the floppy is
still slightly intermittent.

The machine had been purchased second-hand and "had been working till it
was moved". It is a 66Mhz 486 with 16Mb RAM and a 200Mb HDD.  It has Win95
& MS Office installed with just 28Mb left for applications and the swap
file.  But it does work!

6. 	New terminology for files

Paul had received an old church record form the UK which had been scanned
and which he accessed via the web as graphic files.  Terminology new to
him, such as wrapped.transparency and wrapped.gif, were used to label the
files, which can be loaded onto any film viewer.  He asked if anyone knew
of this terminology.  Emil offered to investigate and will post his opinion
to the Group.

7.	Which modem?

Which modem will give most reliable service for the price?  The latest
Consumer Choice has a list of ten, Maestro coming last.  Bob had recently
bought a Maestro 56K Magic Mouse from the Mac's Reef Road plant for $146,
and it gave no problems.  Maestro had also sold him a Jetstream 56 for
$149, but until the speed was slowed to 28.80 it caused drop-outs.  Maestro
told him this problem would be dealt with in a couple of weeks.  Emil noted
that TIP does not yet support v90.  John reminded us that $200 buys a modem
that supports both 33.6K and v 90.  The Netcomm Roadster was very good, for
example.

Members complained about the performance of various modems.  Gordon said
that the markets sell cheap ($89) modems.  When these are outdated he
throws them away and reuses the software.

Allan said that TIP did not support 56K, 46K being the commonest speed. 
Modem connection speed typically changed two or three times in a session,
and has been logged at 12 times in a session.

8. 	Should we buy Ghost?

It was decided that John would write to PCUG about buying Ghost
file-copying software, after having double-checked the functions of
Partition Magic, for which an upgrade is available.  Emil noted that Ghost
(a New Zealand program) was highly valued and well supported in large
organisations.  He referred us to an article in Sixteen Bits on the
subject.

9. 	ICQ

Because ICQ is so popular, it may sometimes be difficult to contact the
server to renew log-on.  

10.  Undelete function

Greg had difficulty finding Undelete in the W95 CDROM.  Previously he had
uninstalled Norton Utilities (which has its own undelete function) from his
machine.  Emil said that when you delete a file it is not literally
deleted, instead DOS alters the first letter of the file name.  Undelete
then restores this first letter.  The Windows and Norton functions were
probably incompatible.

11. 	Installing W98

We heard that W98 can be successfully loaded over W95.  Though the best of
all situations is to have a clean disk, this is not always feasible, for
once you uninstall W95 you have to reconnect all applications back into
Windows, which takes time and effort.

12.	Budget cartridges

Gordon has purchased budget reload cartridges from Adelaide priced at $21,
less than half Canberra prices.  Shipment was $3 for 10 cartridges and took
five days.  Budget Reload (http://www.recyle.net.au) offers Canon and Epson
cartridges, not HP.  

13. 	Attaching image files to Hotmail.

Image files attached to Hotmail should be kept down to 250K, and should be
sent one at a time as the recipient's situation is not known.  

14. 	PCUG's AGM, Christmas Party, new phones

Allan announced that the held-over PCUG Annual General Meeting would be
finalised on Monday 23 November at 8 pm at the Centre.  The following
Monday is the PCUG Bring and Buy Sale and PCUG Christmas Party with Sausage
Sizzle.  Allan also warned that Telstra would be installing the PCUG's new
telephone lines this Friday 20 November.


JL 18/11/98 1389

**********************************************************
Coffee & Chat Page, including archives of past meetings
http://www.pcug.org.au/~rcook/c&c.htm
These Archives are now searchable.
***********************************************************
Return to the Index or the Coffee and Chat Page