Meeting 23 January 2001


The following items were listed on the whiteboard:

1.LeeD - What experiences have people had with V.90? Is it worth coverting?
how serious are W98 shutdown problems?
2.RodS - What experience had there been with web-page makers? Is there a
best of breed recommendation?
3.MargaretD - Does the screen have to remain switched on while the
maintenance wizard does its job?
4.RodB - Has anyone found how to lock columns for a given folder in Outlook
Express?
5.Kevin - Is there a recommended best buy among CD burners?
6.MikeD - Report on Cachex and freebmds

As of 10am 27/01 the following responses had been received:

3.Majority of opinion was that I should leave the screen off.  Other opinion
was not to use Maintenance Wizard but to do scan disk and defrag manually on
a regular basis once every week if heavy user and once every so often if not
a heavy user.
4.Inability to lock column specification to a particular folder appears to
be a limitation of  OE. The more capable Outlook does not have this problem.
There may be discussion in Microsoft's Knowledge Base (I haven't checked
yet).

The six items listed did not exhaust the meeting's time. There was further
open discussion of several items.

Download Accelerator is now thought to be a useful piece of software. It
appears to work by setting up multiple sessions with host sites thereby
improving performance through parallelism.

The use of validators to check web pages for compliance with standards was
recommended. A particular validator to be found at www.cast.org/bobby was
mentioned as a good example.

There was discussion of various power management schemes. It seems their
effectiveness depends on the particular hardware and its usage patterns.
Many people recommend not using them.

There was also discussion of the value of such maintenance as defragging. No
one could cite a noticeable improvement in performance after defragging.

AllenM reported on difficulties being experienced with the User Group's ISP
and progress in respect of switching to Optus in that role.


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