Meeting 22 August 2000 Intro. Ken chaired this mornings meeting which started with a discussion about money. Anyway, to cut a long story short, it was decided to place a moratorium on the $2.00 fee till Xmas. Lost Icons. Mary had a young person "fix" her computer, the result of which was that she no longer had her short cut to Solitaire. Assuming that the exe file was still there, several options are available to play the game; 1. Start->Programs->Accessories->Games 2. Look in the Recycle Bin for the Icon and Restore it. 3. Start->Find->Files or Folders and look for sol.exe, and once found, Right Click on it and "Create a Shortcut" Disk Image Rod reported a good news story, the CnC copy of "Upgrading & Repairing PCs" has a CD with a program called Disk Image. This does as the name implies. It is like Norton's Ghost®. Remember that Drive Copy that comes with Partition magic does not allow the transfer of the OS. PDF->.DOC format The matter of conversion from PDF to Word's DOC was the subject of much discussion. No one was sure if it was possible to convert this way, though conversion from DOC to PDF is routine. It was suggested that with Distiller, you could open the PDF document and do a Save As .DOC file. Another route was to go to www.gohtml.com (URL not tested) where it was possible to convert PDF to HTML, then take the HTML into Word and then Save As a .DOC file. Thanks to Bob for revisiting this subject. Unicode What started off as a simple request for a unicode driver for Al's 1120C printer turned into an interesting tutorial on Unicode. Once upon a time we had 127 bits to play with to make our a's b's and c's, but then those foreign devils wanted their é's and å's etc(sorry if your newsreader can't read those symbols), so they decided to use 256 bits. Then came the Chinese and Japanese with their 20,000 odd characters, so unicode came to the front, for it can encode 65536 characters. UTF8 and UTF16 were good buzzwords for all this. Windows 2000 already works in unicode, and stuff copied to the clipboard is automatically converted into UTF8 if the application receiving the paste is not unicode aware. Thanks for the talk Al, very interesting, and your drivers will either be found or not through the good offices of MS or HP. Proxy Problem. One of the more common help desk type enquiries concerns proxies. Gavin's query was easy. For IE5+ do this; Tools->Internet Options->Connection Select your TIP connection if you have more than one ISP Settings button, Tick the second tick box which says "Use Automatic Configuration Script" and insert in the text box http://www.pcug.org.au/proxy.pac Registering W98 We had a discussion some Months ago about the difficulty of registering MS products. The phone was the way to go, but you may need to know some information before you start. Go to Start->Settings->Control Panel->System and look on the General Tab where you will note a "Registered To....." followed by a number. Mail What happens when you go away and your mail box gets full? Well it seems fairly prevalent, that when you attempt to down load all that mail, it is likely to hiccup on a big message and disconnect you. This happens so often that one wonders what could be cause of the problem. The fix is simple, if you can't use telnet to clear your mailbox, go to say www.mail2web.com , use the Advanced logon option, enter the Mailserver as mailhost.pcug.org.au, your account name (the first part only of your e-mail address)and password. Use the Delete function to remove the large unwanted e-mails, and then you will find you can download the rest as normal. Of course it may not be a mail problem, if you can stay on while just browsing, then you know for sure it is a mail problem. Happiness Ted explained that one of the simple joys of life was to go to the National Library and read their magazines...for free! He has found a new mag which is high tech but readable, MIT I think he said, but see http://www.techreview.com for more interesting details. He also didn't see any value in MP3s, but Mike gave us a good rundown on the pros of MP3 technology, noting the zillions that had been invested so far. Interestingly, Mike once had access to all the tapes from the Apollo program which would have made and ideal conversion to MP3 for CD distribution. Good idea actually, something I guess the Sound and Film Archives should be into. More happiness Charlie bought a laptop, AGM PII Celeron CD 13" screen 64 meg of RAM + modem for $2000. Drool drool, but he had a problem. It seems that not all R-W discs are the same and so cannot be read in some cases. It appears that this is a well recognized problem and it is possible to get software fixes for this problem. Good luck Charlie. Y2K problems. http://www.daqarta.com has a freebie software fix for older BIOSs that can't cope with Y2K. Richard has had two of these in the last fortnight. Extra Lines Just a warning, if you opt to get an extra line installed, you may not get what you are thinking you are getting for Telstra will gang up lines to give extra capacity, but at the cost of bandwidth, so suddenly your u-beaut 56K modem now chugs along at 14.4K. I have no idea how you get Telstra to tell you, but find out from them how they intend to implement the extra line, it may not be what you want. MS Mysteries(1). Jeff reported he solved a mail problem from reconfiguring the POP3 server to mailhost.pcug.org.au from 127.0.0.1 For reasons best know to MS, this setting is occasionally reset to those numbers, and if it is, that means no mail. MS Mysteries(2). Ever been sitting down in the quiet of the night and noticed that your computer working away without your permission? If you have, then don't worry like Anne did, this is normal behavior and things like FastFind or an Anti Virus program might be running in the background. Do this, Start->Run and type in msconfig then OK. Have a look at the Start Up tab, it will give you a good idea of what is automatically started. Actually, only a few of the programs listed are needed, and most can be turned off for improved performance, but I don't know which ones are essential, so I leave well alone. So endeth another CnC, next one on the South Side, Wednesday 30th, and on the North Side, 5 September. -- ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/c&c.htm These Archives are now searchable, and also include some minutes of the Internet SIG, run on alternate Mondays ******************************************************Return to the Index or the Coffee and Chat Page