This morning's meeting was again well attended, Ken Meadows spoke first, warning not to carry out any major upgrades before a long weekend, He started something Thursday, got stuck, and could do nothing till today. It all started with a scratched CD which was giving problems. Two remedies were offered, firstly Harvey Norman sell an Aerosol cans of spray which will protect CDs, the second was the old tooth paste trick, highly recommended by a magazine "You'll wonder where your CD went When you clean you disk with Pepsodent" And then onto Hard Drives, most makers put the relevant information on the HD these days, but if it is a Segate, you can get lots more info by going to http://www.seagate.com , very helpful. The BIOS came in for a bit of discussion, when you first switch your computer on and it starts a quick memory test, there may or may not be a message "Hit DEL to enter SETUP". As this message can be switched off in the BIOS, just hit DEL during the memory test. From here you can go through the various parameters, and when you get to the Hard Disk part, it is probably worth while to do a Print Screen, and save the information for later use, like when your battery dies. So how do you know when your battery is about to die, well it seems that you may get several months warning, like your clock does stupid things, or maybe it can't identify the HD (this is why you need the BIOS info). Also Norton Utilities has a program that will give a readout on your battery status, Norton System Doctor I think it was called. Also it was suggested you can get most of your BIOS information from running MSD, and again, print out the important stuff for future use. Will a start up disk made on one machine work on another ? Well yes and no. A basic start up disk made by FORMAT A:/S will get most machines up and running, but if for example the start up disk included the autoexec.bat and config.sys from one machine, they may not be compatible with another machine. Some men give their partners power drills or chain saws for Xmas, well Gordon Urquhart has learnt this trick, he gave his kids three CDs for Xmas, How to use Access, Excell and Word 7, he has a great reference library now. This revelation rose from an observation by one member who had seen a video on how to fix your computer, he was so impressed, he wondered what other videos on computing were around Another member had Corel3, upgraded to Photo 5 and wanted to know if Corel 7 was worth it. Generally the view was that the extra facilities in Corel 7 were probably not worth it. The online edition of Sixteen Bits should now be functioning correctly, TIP has been upgraded to facilitate the downloading of a page at a time. You need Acrobat3 (which should be, but may not be on TIP), and probably Netscape 3, though I will try 2.02 to see if that works. MSIE is a no no. See http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/16bits/ There was some discussion about backing up 400 megs of Hard Disk drive, but after some discussion, it seemed that really only the data and vital programs needed to be updated, and a Zip drive was all the go. 100 Mb disks were fairly cheap, $35 at Dick Smith, $30 at harvey Norman, and $22 via mail order. People who use Zip drives were generally very happy with them. That was more or less it for another fortnight, about 40 people turned up, an interesting day. There was a BBQ afterwards just round the corner at the John Knight Memorial park, beautiful weather, so I hope those that went enjoyed it. Cheers till next time Owen
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