The meeting today was attended by 41 people at the Irish Club Weston.
It was "chaired" by JimH and I took a note of the subject headers.
Please send me comments re the subjects by midnight Friday 21 and I'll
collate and post the final notes on the weekend.
1. Printer problems - Anne
My printer ceased to work after I had just had the drivers reinstalled
and had fitted a new colour cartridge. Members variously advised me to
check the power and cables, check the CMOS to be sure that the printer was
connected to the ECP port, and to run the test page when the printer
was both connected, and unconnected, to the computer. I was also advised
that if all else failed to take the printer to the Cartridge Factory and ask
their advice as to whether it was the ink cartridge, the printer or the
computer.
As none of the first suggestions worked I went to the Cartridge
Factory who advised that the cartridge was dry and fixed the problem gratis.
Exceptionally good service.
2.a. Tivo - JohnS
I passed around a brochure for an American appliance called TiVo - see
www.tivo.com . This records several TV channels simultaneously to a
hard disk drive. A phone connection downloads schedules and changes to
schedules. Just put in your preferences and the rest is apparently
automatic. Up to 60 hours can be saved. But the beauty of the device
is that it can be played back simultaneously with recording.
The idea is that you can watch any program you want at any time
you want. The program can be paused, 'rewound', fast 'forwarded' etc.
Never watch an Advert again! Needless to say it has the large
commercial channels running scared...
The 'box' costs US $400 and the phone subscription US
$12.95/month or US $249.00 for the "lifetime of the product".
It (and other similar products) have been on sale in the US for
over 2 years - why not here? I believe they are also sold in UK - so a
PAL TV model should be available. My liking for conspiracy theory
tells me that there are powerful forces against selling them here
{:-((
Coincidentally - I received some junk mail from Panasonic
yesterday introducing their new DMR-E20 digital video recorder. Very
little info is available at www.teampanasonic.com.au but it appears to
be a DVD recorder with some hard disk caching? It's only Aus $3,299
2.b. Drive Image 2002 - JohnS
2.b. Have recently purchased Drive Image 2002 from our friends in the
Software Shop - $132 after discount. This appears to be the ideal
backup solution - saving your entire hard disk image to CDs or ZIP,
another HD drive, or a networked drive - spanning disks or CDs as
necessary. Individual partitions, folders or files can be recovered
from the image using the full Windows interface (or a 'Windows like
interface' DOS boot program if recovering the active system
partition).
The software is also ideal for copying entire drives when upgrading to
a larger hard disk. Yes I know that Norton Ghost does (mostly) the
same tasks, but not nearly so elegantly - O.K if you like working in
DOS. Read about Drive Image at www.powerquest.com
3. Home Page - RodS
I have been trying to sort out problems with the link between www in
addresses and the home page. This is my current understanding:
a. www need not be included in the address of a URL, it is only
convention.
b. By default, if access to the internet is directly via the Internet
Explorer icon, when searching for a home page the system expects to
find www and if it is not there will send the message "Unable to find
Server".
It appears the system first looks in the cache and can only find URLs
with a www in them.
Even though the address line reports the search is for the numeric
version of the URL, it appears it is still looking for www.
c. Even if the page is found and the address stored as "Current Page"
the system still searches for www the next time access is attempted.
d. If a connection to the internet is made before selecting the IE
icon, the page is found without any trouble.
4. Modem line dropouts - Merv
From Owen:
To check the quality of your line, go to
http://www.pcug.org.au/cgi-bin/modem-status.cgi
Remember that this only works if you are connected via the main
telephone number, 62066200
Owen
5. WXP Video demo - MikeD
From Emil: For some reason or other I did not receive your posting to
the mailing list re the topics of the meeting on Tuesday. Then I saw
Owen's post to the mailing list which made me realise that you did
send one.
Anyhow, this is my contribution re Mike's demo:
I am not familiar with Microsoft Video Maker nor have access to it.
My favourite video processor is a freeware called "VirtualDub". The
latest version is 1.4.10. It has a great flexibility and powerful
features.
A captured AVI format file can be reprocessed ("rendered") using that
program to various video and audio formats, with any desired changes
to resolution, contrast and what have you.
The finished product is usually compressed to 10 MB per minute.
There is no need to break up a captured AVI file into separate scenes,
as Mike suggested in the case of MS Video Maker. The whole (or part)
of the file can be rendered in VirtualDub as one continuous project.
MS Video Maker seems ideal for tiny clips to share with (e-mail
tolerant) family or friends. However, to do justice to a video, and
particularly a historical video, it is best to preserve it in toto.
I recommend the creation of VCD (Video CD) using ordinary cdrom
blanks and the usual cdrom burning software. VCDs can be played with a
DVD player (now selling at about $250 - $350) and home Television or
on any computer using software like PowerDVD or WinDVD. Personally, I
had some excellent results.
6. Uninstall Quicken4 - BobS
When opening a Quicken 4 report in the past it was possible to simply
change the report dates.
Recently when trying to change any date the following message appears;
"This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut
down"
Details are shown as follows;
QW caused a segment not present 000049f7"
Solutions attempted include;
1. Reinstalling Quicken from the floppy disks.
2. Deleting all QW.EXE files
3. Renaming the Quickenw folders and deleting same, then reinstalling
Quicken from the floppy disks
4. Using Start>Settings>Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs, (but
Quicken is
not listed.)
Nothing stopped the error problem.
When the Quicken was installed on another PC, the program worked
perfectly.
Bob S
7. TransACT - Simon
8. Jpeg cleaner - Peter
Peter asked how he could minimize the size of JPG files for use on a
web page. He was told to experiment with file sizes using both GIF
and JPG formats. He is using Paint Shop Pro. Paint Shop Pro has a GIF
optimizer as well as a JPG optimizer for reducing file size. To use
the GIF optimizer choose File, Export, GIF Optimizer. You can reduce
the file size by choosing a smaller number of colours. To use the JPEG
optimizer choose File, Export, JPEG Optimizer. JPG files are 24 bit
images, which can be compressed by about 70 per cent without much
noticeable loss of quality using the JPEG optimizer. Resizing the
image (suggested maximum 700 pixels wide) was also recommended. A free
program called JPG Cleaner, available from
http://www.pppr.sk/rainbow/programs.html was also suggested.
From RodB:
I haven't really thought this through, but you might want to attach
the attachments to this weeks notes. Under item 8 you might want to
add something about examples scanned at 96 dpi compressed at level 3
out of 10 where 10 is no compression and 1 is maximum.
Regards, Rod.
9. Direct Cable connections - Derek
10. ISP/browser problem - Rob
11. Scandisk - Owen
============================
NOTE RE LAST WEEK'S MEETING:
CandC note re north meeting Tuesday 11th June from SimonC
From: "Cowling Family"
Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 21:40:41 +1000
Hi, Trevor,
Still have not received the preliminary notes from last Tuesday..
For my item on TransACT - Good experience story - Connection went
smoothly as installer was a former Telstra technician so phone change
over went without a hitch (keeping old Telstra number). TV
installation went OK but Internet connection required me to ring
Netspeed as the installer was not computer literate. However Netspeed
helped set up the necessary change to the log in.
Telstra's rental charges were costing me $40 per month for 2 lines.
TransACT's will be $45 pm but I will save up to $20 pm in phone calls
to connect to Netspeed via modem. The main gain for the family is
quality TV pictures as we are in a poor reception pocket.
Download speed has gone up from 4 Kb/sec to 22 Kb/sec.
Thanks, Simon.
*****************
The probable reason that people didn't receive the preliminary notes
for the Tuesday 11th was because I posted to the newsgroup only and
not to the list so well maintained by JohnS. My apologies to all those
affected. Poor memory comes with an increase in age -- so I'm told!
Regards, Trevor
******************************************************
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