JimH presiding, JohnS "volunteered" for notes, 37 plus attended.
Jim's items were:
A. Charlie Karlsen was inducted  to generous acclamation as a Life Member of
the C& C Group for his general contributions to the group and in particular
as Treasurer .
B. Drew attention to the fact that the hidden restore files in ME and XP
need to be disabled to quickly rid them of virus infection. (This deletes
all restore points and generates a new - virus free one. ED)
C.  Freeware compatibility with XP,  With XP you can go to the individual
program's properties and change the compatibility setting to emulate a WIN
95 or WIN 98 platform.  (Just right-click on the icon, click on properties,
go to compatibility, and fire away!).  The program might "feel more
comfortable" by tweaking its properties that way.

1. On-Line Security   -  Greg

2. Internet - Auto disconnect  - BobS
When  online on internet an unsolicited Drop Down Menu appeared called "
AUTO DISCONNECT ", which advised  " This call has been idle for the last 5
minutes, HANG UP or CANCEL". When no action was taken a disconnect happened.
The problem was found to occur following the recent installation of TICK.
Went to TICK > Options >Miscellaneous > Disconnect > 'Idle for more than 5
minutes', and disabled this by changing 5 to 0.

Problem solved thanks to C & C !


3. A. Show & tell  -  JohnS
I passed around a "standard" double headed IDE drive cable (3 X 40 pin
sockets - 40 conductors), and the equivalent 39 pin (80 conductor) "ATA 100"
cable, for comparison. Hopefully those who like to fool with hardware got
the message - don't try to use the new cables with old 40 pin equipment, but
new 39 pin equipment can use the old cables O.K. - albeit at a slower speed.
B. New HDD
Brought a new Seagate 60 Gb 7200 rpm drive at the markets last weekend
($180), to replace an "old" 20 Gb Fujitsu drive which has developed heat
related problems. BIOS recognised the drive first time, but XP did not of
course. Could not find a way to "F-Disk" it using XP (although I know it's
there somewhere). Went back to the good old WinXP emergency disk & F-Disk'd
the new one as one Ginormous partition (I want it for video editing). Then
used XP to format with no problems (although it only gave me NTFS as the
format choice - thought it would include FAT32 - but no problem NTFS is
better anyway).
The size (and cost) of these big disks blow me away.
I must point you again to the article that Emil posted about recently at
http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/Issues/Comsci02/Compsci2002-05.html That's a
superbly written piece with great analogy's. To roughly paraphrase one bit -
the author says
"I hold in one hand an (old) 120 Mb hard disk which would easily hold
everything I have ever written in my life. In my other hand I hold the
latest 120 Gb disk which would not only hold that - but everything I have
ever read as well".
Of course he's talking text only - but a sobering thought.....

4. Demo - Goldwave 5.1 .- TedM
Goldwave 5.1  A demonstration of the application called Goldwave
was given. It tested out the sound system of the meeting room at the Irish
club. The example used was the removal of  pops and crackles of  a 1924 HMV
record.
Ed: I thought it was a very good demonstration of the power of computers to
make a complex task look (relatively) easy. The removal of white noise of
almost equal level to the voice was amazing to me. Someone commented that
the end result sounded like it was recorded in a barrel - it probably was!
Or at least using a large horn voice "concentrator".

5. Copy Proof CDs  -  Emil
The major Music Labels in its crusade against copying music tracks off
Compact Disks are experimenting with various schemes of copy-proof
CDs.
These copy-proof CDs cannot be played with CD drives attached to
computers and such. Indeed, any attempt to do will, at a minimum, lock
up the computer and prevent the ejection of the CD from the drive. To
get the disk out of the drive may require forced manual ejection by
inserting a paper clip through a tiny hole in front of the drive. Few
drives don't even have such a hole.
The compact disks in question carry warnings and do not have the usual
logo of CDs (because they are not standard CDs). But users may miss
those warnings and the lack of logo.
Reuters reports that a way was found to defeat the copy-proof scheme
employed by Sony (and perhaps by other Music Labels as well) by
marking with a black felt-tip pen the outer edge of the CD.

The Reuters story is at:
http://webcenter.newssearch.netscape.com/aolns_display.adp?key=2002052013080
00270271_aolns.src

Charles Added:
This article from Reason (see URL) is a big extension of copy
protection both in principle and scope and time frame 2010 !
"The Content Faction believes the digital world isn't safe unless every tool
also functions as a copyright policeman."
see http://www.reason.com/0205/fe.mg.hollywood.shtml

A great article! (Ed)

6. On-Line-purchases - Graham
7. Partition Magic 7 disaster - MikeD
8. PhPost - JoanH
9. WordXP (A mind of its own) - Derek
10. C&C3 - TerryB
11. Printer passed through scanner - RodS
I recently changed my parallel port printer and scanner from my desktop to
my laptop.  The printer is passed through the scanner.  It has always worked
without any problems but this time only printed a single line of garbage on
each of what seemed, potentially, an unlimited number of pages.
The computer Bios for the parallel port was set to bidirectional, which I
thought would be all encompassing. On advice from the meeting I changed to
ECP - which caused a Bios failure, and then to EPP which solved the problem.

12. Moving Applications - CharlieK
As part of establishing his new machine, Charlie had transferred a disk
from the old machine to the new and was now transferring applications
from one disk to another.
To do this he was using "Magic Mover" which came as part of Partition
Magic 4 (but not as part of Partition Magic 7 - the latest release).
    Having moved some critical systems it appeared that all went well except
that he had found that some of his internet connections seemed to have
been disrupted.  This affected Outlook, Agent and EZ Trust Anti Virus
download.  At the time of mention, this had only just occurred and he
had not had time to investigate the issue, but raised it in the hope
that someone might have an immediate answer.  As it happened, no-one
did, however subsequent to the meeting and after only a short time
investigating the problem, he discovered that by resetting his mail
account in Outlook and re-installing Agent, all the problems went away.
This is probably a Winsock problem related to moving applications from
their originally installed home base, and you really need to reset
everything to make sure the settings "stick" to the new locations.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

P.S. There was some discussion on the relative merits of "PowerQuest Drive
Image 5.0" and "Norton Ghost 2002" for cloning drives when upgrading.
Probably not unbiased, but Aussie PC World Mag (Apr 2002) says:
"Without doubt, Drive Image is the superior product, much easier to use than
Ghost and let down only by it's lack of support for home networking (neither
product is suitable for cloning across a server-based network). A little
more recognition of External CD drives from both would be welcome next
time".
Drive Image retails at $149.95 (Upgrade $109.95) and Ghost is $147.54 (no
mention of upgrade). Should get a 10% discount at the Software Shop.
P.P.S. I subsequently visited the Software shop & found they are selling
DriveImage 5 for $140 and the upgrade for $99 - but then visited
Powerquest's web site & find there is a DriveImage 2002 version on sale in
the US - this does Networks, CD ROMs and has built-in backup applications
etc. Perhaps we should wait awhile.
Cheers - JohnS


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