Meeting 25 July 2000 VISE Mike Stock, CEO of VISE visited and recalled the efforts of PCUG members in assisting in the introduction of the Internet to rural dwellers. There is to be a fund raising concert for VISE Saturday 14 Oct 2000. It will be at the Southern Cross club, 7.00pm to 10.00pm Stars at this concert will be Ted Egan, Felicity, Chantelle Delaney, Greg Champion, Andrew Clermont and the comperes will be Larry Appley and Heather Honey. All this and more for $12.00. Contact for CnC members is John Saxon, jsaxon@pcug.org.au . Admin Charlie tabled a letter from the Cancer Society thanking us for our donation earlier in the year. Beeline. In April's PC Authority CD, there was a program, Beeline, which canvassed 26 search engines in one hit. Ted found this to be a good tool, but was requested to do a comparison with Coppernic. In the meantime, Google still seems to be the way to go. Is you system up to date? If it's working, don't fix it, but Ken found a program from http://www.catchup.com that scanned your hard disk and reported on all your outdated files with links to get the new ones. System File Checker also had some remarkable file analyses routines, but required detailed knowledge of files and what they were meant to do. Also there was some confusion as to the date and version numbers which could give some trouble. Anyway, Ken ended up reformatting C: after a yellow box appeared on his screen and started to follow the mouse pointer around. Registering W98 A potential problem with the On-line MS registration centre appears in that you can't log into it, it's too busy.....everyone registering their MS product? With your MS product, there is a yellow card with a phone number to ring, and this number is believed to be 13 25 08, so try that, lot less painful than trying to connect to MS, and if that fails, then just post the completed Yellow card into MS. OE (*shudder*) Yet another mystery reported by Geoff concerning his OE, he could not see his mail, but on moving the mouse pointer over where the mail should be, the message would magically appear. The whiz kids rolled their eyes and pretended not to hear. It was recommended that an attempt be made to repair the program Start->Settings->Control panel->Add/Remove Programs->IE and answer "Repair" to the question that comes with attempting to delete it. Then follow the instructions. VB Problem. John was using a VB front end to run a Fortran program, 3 DLLs were called and the system always failed on the third DLL call. CnC was honored to be presented with such a problem, finally agreeing that there was sure to be something wrong, and maybe a VB newsgroup might be the way to go. Standby...Suspension on the way. Avid readers of this forum will be aware of John S's attempts to activate Standby and/or Suspension of the system. He is nearly there, but still yet so far from success. We wish him well. In the meantime, Rod has a laptop in which suspension/standby mode has always been a bit of a mystery, and after six months of trying to conserve power, he was asked, quite bluntly by his laptop, "You have been unsuccessfully attempting to activate power saving over the last few months. Do you wish you continue? Answer Yes or No. Rod pressed NO, and his power management went into that big bit bucket in the sky. Perhaps a reload Rod? Strange noises from the HDD Halfway through printing, Mary's computer would make a strange noise. She attempted to mimic the noise, but alas, that only confused the issue. After much interrogation, it was felt that the noise was coming from a wav file. Start->Settings->Control Panel->Sounds , then, in turn, highlight each sound for which there is an associated event and preview it, eventually you come to the sound that you are looking for. This might also be an opportunity to change some of your sounds to ones of your liking. Word Pad...Word Wrap? The problem here was that despite all word wrapping appearing normal, printing would lead to a different (and faulty) page layout. The chances are that this is a printer properties problem, so do this; Start->Settings->Printers and then right click on your default printer and go to the properties. Then depending on your Printer software, search around for the "Paper" attribute, and make sure it is set for A4, not Letter which seems to be the US default setting. Overseas....getting PCUG Mail When away from home, and access is only available from cafes and the like, go to http://www.mail2web.com or http://www.thatweb.com to access your mail. My own experience with mail2web, is that you need to use the advanced login and set the mailserver as mailhost.pcug.org.au For security, make sure you not only logout, but also close the browser down when you finish. If you can clean out the cache before shutting down, take that path as well. It was advised that in making PDF files, use BMP formatted images rather than JPGs in your Word document as the resulting PDF file will be much smaller than with JPGs. And just a reminder, the CnC Adobe Distiller program is available for all PCUG members. It actually works. Demo Thanks to Mike D, another demo was given on "My Album". It truely is a great free program with probably more features than most people can cope with. The URL for this freebie is http://perso.libertysurf.fr/pmeindre/MyAlbum.html and highly recommended to all those interested in developing an cybertype album. That was it folks for the 25th, the next Northside gathering will be the 8th of August. How the year has flown! Owen -- ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, including 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