Minutes of the Meeting held 18 December 2001 This, the final meeting for 2001, was chaired by TerryB at the Irish Club and notes were taken by RodB. The next meeting will be on Jan 8 at the PCUG Centre, Belconnen. If you can add to the notes that follow, please send me your comments. The meeting was particularly well attended, because it was followed by a very enjoyable Christmas Lunch where a number of spouses and friends joined the members. Items discussed at the meeting were: 1.a) RodB noted that even though Norton AV had detected and processed a virus on incoming mail and stated that the file was now safe to work with, it still claimed a virus was present when the deleted file was selected in the Deleted Items folder of Outlook Express for permanent deletion. b) Rod also reported that his relatively new system occasionally locks up and requires to be reset or switched off at the mains. On the most recent occurrence the lock up was accompanied by a blank screen. On rebooting, the CMOS utility was called automatically with an incomprehensible (to Rod) comment about machine settings related to bus speeds. No particular comment was offered by the members, except that reference to the motherboard manual might help. Information to be found there might not be very illuminating. c) Rod now has access to his son's early serial connected digital camera. The software does not detect the camera. The meeting suggested that the use of COM1 while an internal modem was using COM3 might be causing a conflict. As an alternative Rod had acquired a Compact Flash card reader. This presents the CF card as an additional removable IDE drive and is very easy to use. 2. GraemeMcC offered a Photoshop manual to any Photoshop using member present. RodB gratefully accepted it. 3. TrevorF thanked members who had offered him help in using TweakUI to remove the "logoff Trevor..." message from the shutdown menu. 4. AlanV, who has many LPs and now a CD burner, asked for information about capturing the LPs to CD. He also recognised that this question as been asked before and suggested that some form of FAQ for C&C was needed. A volunteer is also needed. January PC User magazine has an article on this very matter. Suitable programs mentioned were "Spin doctor" and "Goldwave". The crucial issue is getting a signal of suitable strength from the LP player to the CD card line input. The Aux or cassette deck output of an amplifier, or a headphone jack were suggested. 5. The need to upgrade IE 5.5 and 6 with a security patch was discussed. Emil reported that Microsoft had known about the problem for a long time, but had not taken action because of the potential impact on the anti-trust case. The publicising of the problem by a third party compelled the action. A couple of people reported intermittent difficulty communicating with the Windows Update site via the start menu command. In passing it was mentioned that Windows 95 is no longer supported by Microsoft. 6. Kryn expressed concern about Ads. and spyware arriving on his computer. He had used "Adaware" and received a detailed report on such items found on his machine and requested what to do next. TerryB said that following directions in Adaware would remove the offending items automatically, but that they would return. "Webwasher" can be used to block their arrival, but needed caution as it had some possibly unacceptable consequences, such as the inability to reach certain sites. 7. TerryB expanded on earlier comments about "POPcorn" (a tool for previewing mail at the server). It does read small amounts of text into local memory if requested, but does not ever read attachments or execute HTML, two common vectors of dangerous code. 8. BobS reported that an apparently failing hard disk had been temporarily resuscitated by installing a replacement motherboard, but that now the machine, with two disks installed, would not boot. Various diagnostic measures, such as swapping hard disks across IDE chains or changing jumpers (although in this hot weather Bob might not be wearing one), were suggested as other ways to see if the machine could be made to boot and thus read the disk. 9. JohnS passed round a dismantled CD drive for members to marvel at its intricacy. There was some discussion about the fact that the eject button on a CD drive does not directly control ejection, but merely notifies the controlling software of a request to eject. 10.a) MikeD reiterated earlier comments about the Omni DVD drive he had acquired, saying that it was competent and could do every thing that was asked of it including copying DVD material to tape and reading multi-regional DVDs. There was discussion about the fact that Chinese made devices were flouting data protection laws. Members were advised that inflexibility was to be retained an early purchase of such a device would be a good idea. b) Mike also gave verbally a report on his Transact experience he had earlier sent to this mailing list, here repeated: "Thanks to Ken Meadows I learned that Netspeed was having an Open Day a couple of weeks ago. They are one of the two Transact ISPs. I went along, met a Transact lady there and asked when I would be connected as it was 3 months since I'd signed up. She said she'd fix. Two working days later I was offered an appointment in a few days. So great progress. "Two installers showed up on time. It took them over 3 hours but there seemed to be no physical problems. It cost 90 dollars for a wired connection to my computer (20 ft from TV top box) - the free delivery is only for a loose 3m lead from the back of the box. I asked for the CDROM for Internet installation but was told I should have been given that when I signed up. Of course I hadn't. Incidentally the installer does NOTHING re setting up the Internet connection. I think you are meant to fix this with or through the ISP. When I called Transact they said they could send out a package the following day or I could go to Dickson to pick one up - no offer to deliver that afternoon. So I drove to Dickson and got a package. "I had a network card in the computer, having used it to interface with my old machine. I replaced that connection with my new Transact lead, loaded the Transact software, typed in my personal info where requested and much to my amazement everything fired up and I was broadband connected! "Speeds are about ten times what I was getting i.e. 50kBytes/sec. A 3meg pdf report from UK took one minute. Same report 10 min via dialup. However, as Darrell and others have pointed out, the download limits and charges are laughable. I have opted for Netspeed's 300Mbytes per month at $27 p.m. plus 22c per Mbyte. But as you can see I use my (notional) daily allowance of 10 Mbytes in 3 minutes! And where does 22c come from? I understand charges to ISPs is less than 10c per Megabyte. It seems ISPs might be behaving like printer vendors - making their money from consumables. "One unresolved problem I have is FTP. I cannot access my pcug or u3acanberra pages via Transact/Netspeed. Won't connect. Can FTP to Netspeed and anonymous FTP to most sites. But no connection to the ones I really need. To test my config I went back to dialup connection to both pcug and zip and all worked as well as it has for the last few years, using the same computer and software (WS_FTP, CuteFTP and Windows FTP). "One other minor problem is Calling Number Display. This comes for free with Transact phone - saves $5 pm cf Telstra. Trouble is it only displays MY number, not the calling number! "The remote control for the Set Top box is pretty Mickey Mouse. To get the menu you push Exit. And to get back to TV press an unlabelled button! And reaction to the remote seems slow." 12. Derek spoke about a program, "CleanReg", he had been using alongside EasyCleaner. It had apparently found more items of doubtful use than had EasyCleaner, but Derek was concerned whether they were truly dispensable. Caution was advised. 13. An advertised comment from TedMac about Windows XP was postponed until next year because time was running short. 14. AlK reported fireworks from the power supply of one of his machines. After discussion it was thought that the power switch may be at fault. ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/ ******************************************************
Return to the Index or the Coffee and Chat Page