John S. welcomed the 34 present, including two new members Peter D.
and Wendy A.  Apologies from Elizabeth, Alf and Ted.  The 2MB Diamond
Stealth Video Card and driver which was kindly donated by Roger was
raffled at 50c per ticket, and despite an enthusiastic spend-up by
Chess, was won by Emil.

Wolf gave the financial report and said that a portable 1.3MB hard
drive had been purchased by the C & C group for $150 with the cradle
yet to come.  This will allow us to load registered programs for
demonstration purposes without infringing software responsibilities..

Adele spoke of problems getting e-mail replies to her PCUG address
instead of to her former ISP Dynamite, but it seems that changes to
her Options has probably corrected this.  She also raised the matter
of screen capture, and various methods were suggested including
Hypersnap (as mentioned in 16 Bits), PrintScreen and cut and paste
through Notepad, and print or save (text only) from there.

Esther had removed V-Safe from her W3.1 before upgrading to W95, and
has been getting "Install V-Safe" warnings each start-up.  Chess
suggested that W95 required that any anti-virus program be disabled
before the upgrade and to be enabled afterwards.  However this program
had been deleted, but left behind a registry entry which required the
program to be run.  Unfortunately, V-Safe had been installed on her
machine at purchase, but no software was supplied to permit
re-installation.  This warning can be removed with Regedit preferably
by an experienced person, or the warning can be tolerated, but a new
anti-virus program should be installed in any case.  Allan is
currently writing a page in TIP Help to address this problem.

Leigh has had to reinstall all his programs on the HD, but cannot
associate Acrobat with his Agent.  There was discussion about Agent
and Free Agent, but it was agreed that the Agent manual was in PDF
format, and used Acrobat to read it.  Agent costs $US 29 direct, or
$US25 (= $A42.50 at the moment) through the PCUG.

Leigh asked for comments on Net Accelerator, and was told that it
downloads all the web pages associated with the page being read at the
time, which will speed up accessing time, but will cost the ISP
unnecessary money if these pages are not used by the subscriber; it is
therefore 'hated' by ISPs.  It differed from Tweak in that Tweak was
initially used for internal networks, so did not consume ISP
bandwidth.

Jeff enquired if he should back-up his C: drive onto D: with W98, and
was advised that it would really not be useful in the event of a
system crash, particularly if they were partitions on the same
physical disk.  However, Roger was able to copy his C: contents onto a
separate HD when W98 warned him of an imminent primary disk failure.
When the primary disk was replaced, Roger was able to boot-up on a
floppy start-up disk, and then copy the files back to the new C:, both
HDs already being recognised by the system.  It worked fine.

Jeff enquired about the advantages of FAT32 compared with FAT16 in W98
and it was suggested that FAT32 had many advantages, but may not allow
all favourite DOS programs to run, so it may be worthwhile configuring
another drive for FAT16.

Wolf said that his W95 computer freezes during shut-down, but
apparently completes its shut-down cycle OK because it starts-up OK
next time.  He has spoken to several other people about this who said
it was a common problem, particularly with a program installation
which requires a re-boot during the installation process.  Chess had
the same thing happen after upgrading top W98, but found that it could
be overcome be downloading and installing the many new W98 drivers
which are now becoming available for peripheral devices.

There was some discussion on the matter of people having varying
amounts of trouble with W98 after upgrading from W95, from none to
considerable.  John said that the upgrade was most successful when W98
was installed over a clean W95, which was verified by a helpful
program on the August APC magazine's CD.  Several members have
acquired copies of a hefty book "Windows 98 Complete" marked at
$19.95, then being discounted to $16.00 from Angus and Robertson.  It
seems that the price has since been increased, and it was thought that
the printed price of $19.95 was in $US, and this may have caused a
mistake in pricing it locally.

Peter sought comments on the Telstra Faxstream Duet facility which
allows a computer to remain online to receive faxes, and still allow
phone usage on the same line with separate numbers.  The cost is $4
per month, but not all Canberra exchanges can yet provide this
service.  However, it will not allow simultaneous use with
phone/fax/modem.  The benefits of distinctive rings (efficiently
mimicked by Owen) was discussed, and certain advantages of Fax/Voice
modems considered, although none seemed to be as satisfactory overall
as a discrete Fax machine for facsimile use.

Peter asked how to identify and change IRQs in W98.  John said to goto
Control Panel/System/Device Manager/highlight 'Computer', click on
properties and the screen will display the IRQs.  Identifying IRQs is
quite easy, but changing them is more difficult; it can be done, but
it is better to allow W98 assign them to manage the conflicts.

Paul was interested in buying a flat bed scanner, and called for
suggestions.  The was much discussion about various brands but
everyone generally seemed quite happy with their own scanners.
However, the Optic Pro was highly recommended for its performance and
excellent included software.  The feeling was that the cheaper
scanners had adequate quality for most purposes, but were slower than
the higher priced ones.

Gloria has just returned from the second VISE course (no, the
Volunteers for Isolated Students Education course) at the Ballarat
University, and gave a report on it.  The aim of VISE is to help
people in the rural regions connect to the internet, and the courses
are to train the volunteers to set-up various types of equipment,
train the rural household for computer/internet operation and to
overcome the special problems associated with communication in
isolated areas.

Some of the first batch of 25 volunteers who had returned from the
field were speakers at the second course, and passed on many helpful
hints and stories.  For example, one volunteer found that the family
dog howled each time the phone rang at the property.  The dog was tied
up with a metal lead which was attached to the fence, and that the
fence wires were used as the phone lines, with the dog completing the
circuit to earth when a ring voltage was applied to the phone line.
So volunteers must be capable of handling all sorts of problems!  

Canberra, and in particular the PCUG, is well represented amongst the
VISE volunteers who came from a wide range of backgrounds.  In the
field they had excellent food and accommodation with friendly hosts.
It is hoped to train 100 people for this project, and to extend the
area to other parts of Australia.  Gloria has been assigned to the
Nyngan area, and will assist twelve families in six weeks.

My apology for the slow posting of this report.

Neville.

>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<
Neville Anderson  -  nevander@pcug.org.au
* Keep your ambition within your reach, but beyond your grasp *
Coffee & Chat Homepage at: www.pcug.org.au/~rcook/c&c.htm
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