A nice winters day and about 35 people turned up for another
interesting meeting. There were a few "new" faces, Roger Lowery
introduced himself, he is now the Flight SimS coordinator, so for all
you FS  freaks, Roger's address is lowery@pcug.org.au

	Mike Dinn advised that the Governments Senior Network was
tentatively due to kick off at 1130, 10 Jul 1997 at the Woden Library,
for those that are interested. While on Seniors, an ad was produced
for a computer show in Sydney, specifically targeting Seniors. Guess
the market must be levelling out.

	Jenny Laraman introduced herself an author working from home,
and gradually getting herself up to speed with computers. She has
heard of computer crashes, and is now so worried, wakes up at night
wondering what a computer crash is.
	Much sympathetic counselling, the major types of problems were
discussed;
   Hard disk failure...use Scandisk at least once a month
   Symantic Crash Guard was also recommended.
   don't bash the computer when it is on, hard disks don't like it
   and of course the inevitable "back up" discussion.
   Keyboards go from time to time due the pounding of the keys, 
   no big deal, just get another keyboard
   Probably best to have a power surge protector in your power line.
   Monitors go from time to time, if your monitor crackles,
   the screen blanks out, you might just have lots of dust inside.

	Of course once the computer goes, you have to reinstall
everything, we had some discussion on backups, It could have been
polling day, Ted Macarthur had us polled on all sorts of things.
How many had a crash?.................................about 40%
How many made full backups?...................................5%
How many made partial backups?..........................50%
How many had no Backups?.....................................45%
How many used a surge protector?.........................95%
How many modems were  lightning protected?...10%

	The major problem seems to be as HDD are now Gigabits in size,
there is no real alternative to backing up other than a tape drive. Re
writable CD Roms were discussed, available now for less than $1000,
but like the writable CD Roms, you can easily blow 50 bucks, and the
general run of computer users would shy away from this. As an aside,
this is why the PCUG did not buy a writable CD Rom.

	There seemed to be many avenues of approach, it all depends on
your needs, Darrell Burkey for example, bought a $300 computer as a
backup,and networked it to his main computer.

	And while on the subject of Darrell Burkey, congratulations
were extended for the awards made to Sixteen Bits (Jim Hume also got a
mention for his Qool URLs). In response, Darrell said he was very
pleased with the awards, but people should recognise that he was
progressing what had been initiated by the Frews, John Hilvert and Lis
Shelley. All the same, well done Darrell.

	Paul Thompson had an FTP problem, with a 16 bit client, he
thought he was getting faulty uploads, changed it to a 32 bit program
and all his home page uploads were in CAPITALS, back to the 16 bit
app, and everything went in as lower case. Someone else had the
reverse problem. Big mystery, maybe there is something in the
configuration that dictates what is uploaded.

	Gordon Urquhart spoke..P133 bench marked at 35, something else
at 50, mmx200 at 80, 168pin memory,$210, 686 200 2megS3 graphics.
Thanks Gordon.  I wonder what Elizabeth made of that :-)

	Next meeting, Ken Meadows will give a demo on how to access
QANTAS and get discounted fares. So that will be 8 July 1997, and
until then, have fun.


Owen 

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