Another great day, 30 or so participants, and Alf told us he
would be away in the good old US of A for a few months, so Ted
Macarther and John Saxon would be taking the chair for the time being.
Have a nice trip Alf.

	Gloria Robbins is sort of on the mend with physio etc, a slow
process, so we wish her well.

	Wolf Lieske gave a run down on the Zip drive purchase, $248
was the cheapest quote, but this was in a quantity purchase. The PCUG
is also thinking of getting a few Zip drives, and it was decided to
leave all to Wolf to sort out, so good luck Wolf.

	On the subject of back up facilities, Allan Mikkelsen is
evaluating a card that allows you to back up using your VCR, sounded
all very interesting and we look forward to hear his report.

	Wolf also gave a status report on the Senior Citizens Netcafe.
There was still no venue for the proposal, and while there appears to
be a budget for the project, there is no clear plan to implement it.
Another problem was that it seemed to be top driven, rather than
customer driven, and so there were a number of uncertainties. All a
bit too hard, so we voted to let Wolf sort it out, good luck to Wolf.

	Elizabeth Ward had a few problems
.. I have Encarta 94 on the computer, but now I have the CD with
Encarta 97, will it work with '94 on my machine ?  Answer, yes, just
simply install it.
..I couldn't get onto TIP over the weekend, why? Answer. A synopsis of
what has been going on in tip.general was provided, and all should be
well now.
..Using Eudora Lite, what does the ^ sign mean against a message.
Missed the answer, but S means sent and O means not sent, maybe
someone with Eudora Lite could enlighten us.

	Emil Joseph has used the Net to defeat boredom ! He tells how
that for three hours a day, he would sit in front of his computer,
getting down the New York Time, the London Times, Stock market reports
etc etc etc. It was driving him nuts, and depriving him of sleep. Then
a IDEA, he searched TUCOWS and found Net Attache. Now all his web
surfing is done automatically, and he can go to bed knowing that Net
Attache will do all the boring work for him.
	Only problem is that it is very user unfriendly in
configuration, and suggested that if anyone would like to use it, he
would help them to configure it. Emil can be contacted at
ejoseph@pcug.org.au

	John Saxon wanted to know if anyone had three serial devices
operating under W95, and Darrell Burkey said yes, he has two modems
and a mouse, and Ken Meadows said yes, he has a modem, mouse and Video
Director. This heartened John who would go away and play some more,
though the word of warning was that Plug and Play had sometimes to be
disabled. Let's know how you went John.

	Darrell Burkey described his experience of PC User Cd Rom, it
was a mine of information, and after the main meeting, he gave a half
hour demo of this wonderful disk. For $6 it was a good investment,
virtually everything discussed in C&C was available off the disk.

	Then we got on to some odd things, like the sorry tale of the
person who installed a Telstra CD Rom, and found it had overwritten
his ISP information with Telstras, bit naughty of them I think. Then
there was the problem of information overload.

	Mike Dinn asks how do keep all your files organised, to which
the statement came that if the computer was a hobby, then you don't
waste time organising it, besides, virtually any program you ever had
can be got off the net or a CD Rom.

	MS Explorer 4 Beta..Warning...If you want to play with this,
make sure you have second computer that you are prepared to throw away
after playing with it. However on the good side, it looks like 4 Beta
will turn into a real good program, even doing some of the Net Attache
things that Emil talked about. Also Netscape 4 was highly recommended.

	Gordon Urquhart advised he had fixed Geoff Mierisch's machine
and now has 2x4meg non EDO 72 pin memories for sale at $20 a pop, if
your are interested, contact Gordon at gordonu@pcug.org.au

	That was about it for the day, the last word went to our
senior member, Derrick Boyd, who, on talking about volunteers, related
the fable that there was once a farmer who sat in the furrow next to
his donkey that had just dropped dead from overwork....the moral being
that if you don't overwork your donkey, it won't drop dead.


Owen

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