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

After administrative matters were attended to, the following items were
raised and discussed.

1. John S continued the story of his new machine specifically in reference
to suspend and standby capabilities. After much searching on the 'net John
found a document that explained the niceties of Advanced Configuration and
Power Interface (ACPI) and its predecessor Advanced Power Management (APM).
Fifteen densely printed pages described amongst other things S-modes, which
define specific methods of controlling the power applied to various
components of computers. As John pointed out BIOS utilities often give
choices between, say, mode S1 and S3 without any other explanation. Now he
knows what they mean. Just to keep us on our toes the definitions of Suspend
and Standby used by Windows 95 are exactly reversed in Windows 98.

John also made several additional points. As a result of building up the new
machine he has set up a network with his old machine apparently so that his
wife can e-mail him when lunch is ready. He is using a 66MHz UATA drive,
which is much faster, but needs a different more expensive signal cable,
which he was annoyed to discover would not connect to his removable disk
carrier. Merv said the latest disk carriers now available can support the
revised cables. John has also now tried "My Album" photo management software
and is very impressed. In some general discussion he said that Windows
should not always be believed when it claims to have a superior driver for a
device - use the manufacturer's driver if possible.

He reported e-mail from Elizabeth in Tel Aviv and that she was continuing to
Petra.

2. Kryn reported that although he is satisfied in general with Windows'
"Send to" facility his rewritable CDs were not available to it and asked how
that could be set up. John S said that the "Tweak All" utility, downloadable
from the 'net, could be used to manage the "Send to" menu, including
deleting entries. Several people were very pleased to hear this, expressing
the view that the menu quickly becomes unmanageable as various pieces of
software are installed.

3. Ted Mac said that some time ago he had requested to be notified of
updates to Microsoft products, but had resolutely ignored the notifications
until just recently. Now having accepted some he had 128-bit encryption on
his system and was in consequence feeling very secure. Other people said
that strong encryption was now generally available and the version of
Outlook Express that could be downloaded as part of IE5.5 contained it.

4. Graham McC found a hyper-search engine called copernic.com, which is an
executable on your own system. It gives a menu of useable search engines and
then provides a single list of responses ordered by relevance rather than a
list for each search engine. The search can be tailored, for example, by
limiting the search to a country (and that does not only limit searching to
.au sites).

Graham also reported a very useful site (http://updates.zdnet.com), which
will search the 'net for updates to any program recorded in the registry as
being installed on your system. He said it did surprisingly well in finding
updates for quite obscure programs (for example, Qtalk). He also noted that
options must be carefully set up to ensure that proxies were correctly used.
Some side conversation here noted that proxies could be identified when
setting up a dial up connection, so that the appropriate proxy for the
connection was always available. The TIP proxy is proxy.tip.net.au.

5. Jim J reported that he had being trying on and off for twelve days to
register his copy of Windows 98 through the Internet with no success. There
was a general view that electronic communication with Microsoft was not
easy, but Jim was recommended to continue trying as the ability to obtain
updates automatically was thought to be very useful. Unregistered copies
cannot receive updates. John S said he had a registry patch which could make
a system appear to be registered.

Jim also said that he had not been able to get through to TIP for an
extended time recently. The meeting acknowledged that there had been a
recent period of extended unavailability, which corresponded to Jim's period
of difficulty.

6. Kevin said he had noticed that a number of Web sites suggested that
Windows Virtual Machine (VM) be installed for satisfactory viewing. On his
attempt to install it the Windows CD had been requested; the software had
not been found. Merv said that it was sometimes necessary to point the
installation process specifically to the \Win9x directory of the CD. He also
pointed out that such installations could be significantly sped up if a copy
of the \Win9x directory was made on the system disk at system installation
time. John S informed the meeting that Windows VM is the Microsoft
equivalent of the Java VM.

7. Rod S gave the meeting a follow up from the previous week on his attempts
to install IE 5.01. He attempted to install it from a magazine CD, but was
informed it was already installed even though the Help About menu item
reported only version 5. He thought that he only had 56-bit encryption and
asked about this. John K said that Service Pack 1 to IE5, obtainable from
Microsoft, had 128-bit encryption.

Rod also reported some difficulty using the "save as" function with web
pages. The meeting generally had no difficulty with this and Rod's
description of the problem suggested that it was a small one-off error he
had committed. Gloria suggested an alternative approach with IE5 would be to
save a favourite for offline use. John S said this was good, but if used
heavily then synchronisation should be avoided if a lot of web time was not
to be wasted. Jim J took the opportunity to ask if upgrading from IE4 was
worthwhile. The meeting was positive about IE5, especially if Outlook
Express was to be used. There are significant improvements to OE.

8. Mike D said he had signed up for EISA and was pleased with the reported
connection speed although disappointed with the overall download speed.
Contrariwise, streaming audio, for example from London Classic, worked very
well. He told us that he continued to be impressed with "My Album" and had
successfully set up an Autorun CD with annotated photographs (including
sound). He promised us a demonstration at the next Belconnen meeting if the
room is available.
There was some discussion of web storage for photographs. Zing and Zoom were
mentioned as useable services. Mike thought that Zing got some business in
producing on request high quality prints from stored images. Mike showed a
page printed from the storage site that automatically included copies of the
same image in a variety of sizes.
Several people pointed out alternative ways of producing similar output, but
not necessarily automatically. John S added that he was most impressed with
the way "My Album" could produce a web page with frames including thumbnails
in one frame and a full size example of the selected thumbnail in another.

9. John K reported a catastrophic system failure, where Windows could not be
booted. DOS could see files and a Norton Zip recovery disk could start
Windows, but it became evident that a system rebuild would be necessary.
This could not be done with a Windows 98SE upgrade CD and 98 had be
installed from the base CD first. Then DOS programs would run, but Windows
3.1 programs would not, until they were reinstalled. After all this work
everything was fine except that the printer would not work. It took some
time to discover that the cat had bitten the cable! A new cable fixed the
problem. John had the view that, because the system had been printing a long
document in his absence when the crash happened, this had caused the crash.
Some scepticism was expressed in the meeting. John said the cat had not
apparently been damaged by the experience, but had only ultimately survived
because it was an expensive Himalayan Blue.

10. The meeting asked that the URL for past Coffee and Chat notes be
included in these notes. The URL is
http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/c&c.htm



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