Minutes of the Meeting held 28 August 2001
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FINAL notes of Coffee and Chat of topics that were discussed at the South
side meeting at the Irish club on 25/08/2001 .
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JS was chairman and 36 people turned up. The small but good room
at the Irish club was full. Anne arrived late because of the snow at Captains Flat.
The snow made her chickens refuse to leave their shed. The meeting began at
10 am.
The treasurer Charlie said that the latest book purchase "Upgrading and
Repairing PCs" 12th edition by Scott Mueller was available on loan for 2
weeks at the club rooms at Belconnen.
The meeting discussed the following topics :
1. Not enough memory -
I didn't find a cure to my OCR program failure, but I did try selecting
"ignore" rather than "close" on the error message splash. The program went
ahead and worked as it is supposed to! Rod B
2. Microsoft's Train Simulator is a very good train engine simulation
program. The engine can be designed to suit and a world wide
range of railway lines is available.It is similar in concept to Flight
Simulator -
I have managed to start the Flying Scotsman and run it for a few miles,
but I didn't turn on the automatic fireman and I suspect I ran out of steam.
Rod B
3. PC Mag World for September mentioned - JS
The magazine in question is Australian PC World. John mentioned it in
relation to an article on how to copy vinyl records - "Convert your
records to Cds" - and 300 photos of Apollo space mission.
The cover CDROM includes an old but full and free version of "AskSam",
which is a free form database which manages information kept in all
sorts of formats. Well worth a look. The Cover cdrom also includes a
lot of multimedia players - DVD players, dvx players and others (not
least are Windows Media Player and encoder 7.1 and encoder 8)
Emil
4. Apropos various matters - Rod S
a Bombaderry bowling club
b Definition of a metronome ... "a fellow who works in the
underground"
5. Stopped computer clock -
Discussion was that the clock on the mother board was maintained by
the mother board battery. Merv said that the battery should not be
touched as this may destroy the CMOS settings. Replacement of the battery
results in the CMOS settings to be set to the default settings, which may
not be the same as those set previously. Your CMOS settings should be saved
before changing the battery. Batteries last up to about 5 years. Lithium
battteries may last up to 10 years. Batteries can be bought for about $3.90
at a photographic shop. This is cheaper than at a computer shop.
6. Non Charging power battery in his laptop computer -
An extra bit about the flat battery in my laptop.
The man at the Battery Factory said there is nowhere in Canberra where it
can be tested or fixed. He suggested I buy a new one overseas as the
cheapest solution.
Unfortunately I can't find any places on the Internet.
Can anyone out there offer a location?
The battery is a MOLICEL MW202BB 11.1V 4500mAh rechargeable LiIon battery.
Rod S
7. Visual Basic course to be run by Rick starting at the club rooms
at Belconnen beginning on Wed. next (29/08/01). All are welcome.
8. Bookmark update. - Grahame . An answer is a shareware program called
TweakIE.
9. Modem noise volume and slow speeds. - Mike D.
10. The experience of the Zone Alarm program to detect intrusions. Peter
said that he had installed the free version of the firewall program Zone
Alarm and was surprised by the large number of potential intrusions that
were detected. A typical Zone Alarm report said; "ZoneAlarm
blocked data sent over the Internet to port 80 on your machine from port
1130 on a remote computer whose IP address is 203.245.45.230. This
communication attempt may have been a port scan, or simply one of the
millions of unsolicited commercial or network control messages that are
routinely sent out over the Internet. There is no need to make any changes
to your settings in ZoneAlarm unless the alerts are interfering with your
ability to use the Internet". Peter was unsure of the origin of these
potential intrusions and did not know if he was missing out on useful
cookies.
Peter H
11. Download sizes. - Derrick
A friend had sent a 10 meg file which took 48 minutes to be received.
Friends should be more considerate as there are limits to email server
storage and to patience!
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To the person who asked me at today's C&C meeting, the free Antivirus
software that KenM recommended instead of IncoculateIT can be found
at: http://www.grisoft.com/html.
Regards, Trevor
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The meeting ended at 11.30 am.
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How to you tell when you run out of invisible ink ?
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ebm
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