Ted M chaired the meeting, which was attended by 37 members. Jenny volunteered to coordinate the Notes. The meeting included: 1) a huge vote of thanks to Allan and all who moved the PCUG servers to TransACT premises over the weekend; 2) news that there would not be an election of the next PCUG President at the 30 September AGM. Allan writes that he is going to post some info on the newsgroups when the TIP changeover dies down a bit. 1. A happy tale: Esther 2. Rod B writes: 2a. After installing Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 (IE6 SP1) the "Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus." checkbox was ticked. As a result no existing attachments in the mailboxes could be accessed. Unticking the checkbox restored access. 2b. Three of four USB ports on my system may be connected to devices that are not necessarily switched on or present. After difficulties with booting and non-availability of a switched on device, spurious entries were found in Device Manager. After deleting these and removing unrequired physical devices a clean boot occurred and normal service was apparently resumed. Devices have since been reattached without a recurrence of the problem. 2c. I showed a printout of an image captured with my new digital camera (Canon Powershot G2). The printout was on coated paper and had been produced with the photo cartridge in my Canon 4310SP printer. That cartridge allows printing at 720dpi and the result of printing a 4Mpixel image to fill an A4 sheet seemed to be considered acceptable by the meeting. An image was also displayed on one of the PCUG Centre resident systems. 3. Format C: Jeff Jeff reports: Following the meeting I decided that, in view of regular troubles and crashes over many months, it was time to upgrade. So I am now learning the wonders of Windows XP and expect no more trouble. Once again I am very satisfied with Hi-Micro of Fyshwick who did the upgrade with a trade-in and installated XP. Hi-Micro advertises in 16 Bits. 4. Question - when is a 40 gig hard disk 30 gigs? Ken M Answer - when it's a Samsung drive. Ken writes: My Samsung 40 gig drive only showed as a 30 gig drive. I queried this with Samsung Taiwan and got a reply in Samsung Jingalese. Apparently the drive is set to be 30 gig and there is a program which when run converts it to a 40 gig. Why, I do not know and this was not explained to me. This program can be downloaded from the Samsung site, but to do so you have to enter the drives, model and serial number. You are not advised of this on the site or with the instructions supplied with the drive. You have to pay for the program. You pay because it is not a Samsung program. The serial number is needed as a record of the download for Samsung and the owner of the program. You only find this out after you install the drive and to get the serial number you have to dismantle your computer and remove the drive. I will stay with it as 30 gig. Samsung appreciated that their site could be better designed ad said they would do this. --------------------------------- Owen writes: This kind of reminds me of the bad old days when the racket was to sell you a 250 Meg HDD as a 120 Meg drive. Some time later an "offer" would be made to "upgrade" your HDD to 250 Megs at a very reasonable figure. Lord knows how many forked out the extra dough for what was no more than exercise in Fdisk So Ken, what does Fdisk want to tell you? Or for that matter, Partition magic? 5. Win98 start-up disk: George R 6. Bunch of stuff: John S (including: hard disk drive rack; world time clock; XP programs; ABT) John writes: A. I recently brought the 'Roll Royce' of removable cradles for hard disk drives. This one is a COMAX ATN-891 model, and both the body and removable tray are aluminium to help conduct heat away from modern 7,200 and 10,000 rpm drives which can get quite warm. The tray also uses a special fan which is called a 'super bottom fan' - many laughs about that one. The fan is an axial flow type mounted under the tray rather than on one end of the body. It used a 39 pin IDE connector but the device can also be used with an old 40 wire cable. I brought it from A.B. & T. for $45 - a little pricey by plastic cradle standards but the quality is much better. B. For those who can stand it - two relatively new FREE XP programs. RegSrubXP and DrvImagerXP from http://home.carolina.it.com/RegSrubXP/RegScrubXP.htm and from http://home.carolina.it.com/DrvImagerXP/DrvImagerXP.htm The first is very similar to the register cleaning part of EasyCleaner but for XP. It also includes a bunch of 'tips' which can 'tweak' the registry if you wish. The second one could be described as a 'poor man's DriveImage' - a free program that will do most of DriveImage's functions which cost Aus $140 or so. C. Also passed around A.B. & T's parts price list - probably (on average) 10% more than the markets but very handy in an emergency. They are on 6253 2677 Northside and 6282 7600 Southside. D. If space permits here's a recent joke which was well received: Donkeys For Sale A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100.00. The farmer agreed to deliver the donkey the next day. The next day the farmer drove up and said, "Sorry son, but I have some bad news, the donkey died." Kenny replied, "Well then, just give me my money back." The farmer said, "Can't do that. I went and spent it already." Kenny said, "OK then, just unload the donkey." The farmer asked, "What ya gonna do with him?" "I'm going to raffle him off." "You can't raffle off a dead donkey!" "Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he is dead." A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, "What happened with that dead donkey?" Kenny said, "I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars apiece and made a profit of $898.00." "Didn't anyone complain?" "Just the guy who won. So I gave him his two dollars back." Kenny grew up and eventually became the chairman of Enron. ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/ ******************************************************
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