Many thanks to Rod for these great notes:

Notes about Coffee & Chat - May 2

In these notes the spelling of names may not be accurate where labels were
not being worn or where speakers were facing away from the note taker. For
the same reason surnames are absent where they are not known to the note
taker.

1.There was some initial discussion that an additional Coffee & Chat meeting
should be held on alternate weeks at the Weston Creek Community Centre. John
Saxon will set this up and inform members when the meetings will commence.

2.John Saxon spoke of his Palm Pilot replacement, a Handspring Visor, in
glowing terms. It can have numerous additional devices attached and is
itself synchronised with a PC through a USB port. It took only 10 mins to
set up the PC desktop application to manage synchronisation. Something like
40 applications were synchronised in 1.5 minutes and left nearly 6.5Mb of
the original 8Mb unused.

3.Rod Blackburn reported that his reinstallation of Quicken 7 under W98 had
problems which had not been evident under W95. Namely, on-screen displays of
reports can no longer have their fonts changed and the width of reports no
longer fit the screen. The Q7 Service pack had been fitted and the Quicken
suggested upgrade of the display driver had been effected with no
significant change. Other members reported no problems, or something similar
which had been unresolved. A suggestion to change the display from 1024x768
was made.

Rod also said that since he installed W98 he had added a disk drive, which
had displaced his CD drive letter, so that reinstallation of Windows
components could no longer automatically find the CD. He asked if anyone
knew where in the Registry Windows looked for that information. Other
members said they would like to know as well. Merv mentioned the Device
Manager capability of altering the drive letter, which doesn't relate to
this particular problem. For other reasons Rod had tried this, but for a
reason not clear to him it had not worked. Trevor Frew thought he had a
document that explained what to do.

4.Trevor Frew reported that he had developed a diskette with a catalog of
magazine cover CD contents, that he would make available to Coffee & Chat
members. During the discussion John Saxon suggested that a mailing list
would be a good way of distributing this information and other C&C matters,
and even volunteered to set one up.

5.Owen said that his question had gone away, because he'd worked out the
answer while waiting to ask it. HTML Image map co-ordinates are not affected
by screen resolution.

6.Greg asked who might readily be able to gain access to free web services
like Global Freeway. The consensus was that access points would be limited
and almost certainly not available to rural users without the need for an
STD call.

7.Jeff Colwell reminded members of an earlier meeting where he reported the
loss of a Word macro. He has found it again through the Word tools>macros
menu item. It is a standard macro supplied by Microsoft. He enthusiatically
recommended Word users to explore these macros as there are many useful
capabilities there.

During discussion the matter of regional characteristics was raised and Jim
said that the installation sequence of various M'soft Office applications
could have a significant effect. Merve supported this and said that if all
desired (regional/keyboard) settings were made in Windows before any
applications were loaded then no problems should be encountered.

8.Esther Macdonald then thanked an earlier meeting for mentioning the
"paperboy" URL. She had found it very useful, but had been disturbed by a
message saying that her network connection was not optimized. Members said
that this was one of the pernicious Web advertisements that masquerade as
Windows messages and could be happily ignored.

Esther also reported that she has experienced repeated failure of the
download of an image at exactly the same location in the image. This can
sometimes be caused by a faulty partial download being saved in the local or
proxy cache. John Saxon said that proxies can be bypassed by using
control-shift when selecting the image to be downloaded. Mike Dinn said that
using the "save target as" item of the right-click pop up menu forces a
reload of the image. He also said that IE5's "refresh" appears to be more
effective than in earlier versions. Yet another suggestion he made was to
use the Download Accelerator program. He had found it effective and was
pleased with it.

9.Kryn said that he was getting a message that "msnp32.dll could not be
loaded", but that it didn't seem to be affecting his system's performance in
any way. Could he get rid of it? Suggestions made included: removing
networking from the start up list; running Easy Cleaner; using the System
File Checker of W98. The last suggestion provoked some discussion of the
merits or otherwise of the SFC. Opinions varied from "An excellent tool" to
"More trouble than it's worth".

10.Mary asked if she could leave her PC running. Again there were a variety
of opinions. If system power management was active and disks and screen were
automatically closed down, it was held that leaving it switched on was a
good thing, but caution was recommended if the machine was to be deserted
for a reasonable period and there was any risk of thunderstorm activity.
Continuous power is an advantage because internal current surges at start up
are relatively damaging to components. Also, continued expansion and
contraction of motherboards between the power off and power on condition
might lead to cracking and circuit failures. In general, displays should
always be turned off when not being used. Their high operating voltage had
greater potential for accidental fires.

Mary also asked if it was possible to obtain cheaper ink cartridges for
printers. Depending on the make and model of printer The Cartridge Factory
may be able to refill cartridges. Their service was reported by several
members to be excellent, in particular for Canon cartridges. Cartridges for
other makes of printer not refillable by TCF may be more cheaply obtained
from advertisers on the 'Net or in the magazines. Shopping around was
recommended.

11.Finally, Daryl gave his impressions of the previous evening's monthly
meeting where there had been a presentation from Transact. It had been a
very good presentation almost totally lacking in useful content. In
particular, there had been no discussion of the services to be offered nor
of their possible costs. There is a suspicion that pricing will be based on
volumes transmitted, which will almost certainly make services too expensive
for average users. Transact said that they will go head-to-head with
Telstra, which may lead to difficulties in achieving the kind of
connectivity that will be needed outside the Canberra area.

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