Minutes of the Meeting held 2 October 2001
Hi All
Following are the notes submitted by 4/13 of those who raised questions,
and a few fictional scrawls from me, in { }
Alan V
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{0. Don't forget the :}
PICNIC/BARBEQUE - All PCUG Coffee and Chat members and partners welcome!
Place: Eddison Park, Woden, Barbeque area below Easty St.
Parking: Launceston Street, opposite Phillip College
Date: Tuesday, 9th October
Time: 12.00 following Southside Coffee and Chat meeting
Nibbles and cold drinks provided - bring your own food, etc.
Maps available Northside meeting, 2/10, Southside meeting, 9/10
Contact: Gloria Robbins
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{1. Cuttoffs from server - Esther
Random cutoffs, usually soon after first logon.
Concensus was *not* at ISP (pcug) end. Check s/w setup, Telstra line,
line-modem-PC connections. }
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2. PC User magazine - Trever frew
(a) First discussed compacting the Windows registry. The consensus
among the group was "why bother?"
(b) PC User CD ROM list from February to October. I've put a text list
of these titles and comments on my htm page under the url
www.pcug.org.au/~tfrew/files.htm
(c) I asked how to get a text file to display lines of 72 characters
rather than word wrapping. Answer was to save the file using Word and
save as text only with line breaks.
Trevor
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3. (Digital) Cameras ; options to hard copy - Alan Vidler
Horses for courses.
Still probably cheaper, better to use traditional camera for roll of
snapshot prints type stuff, but digital better if want to have all or
nearly all in machine readable form, or only print a small proportion of
shots.
Many/most film developers can give you a CD with stuff on it at relatively
small extra $$.
Digital camera has advantage can see on spot if looks OK, can delete if
want, etc.
Place in Qld where can send CD or email for printing.
*Not* simple/routine to get good results printing photos to colour printer
[need calibration, experimentation, special paper etc]
Digital cameras can be expensive on batteries-->use recahrgeable and carry
spares, esp on long trips in bush etc.
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Item 4
Lance Court had an intermittent problem with connecting to TIP. He was
using manual connect rather than a script to try to see where the
problem lay. It appears to connect but about one time in five it is
unable to resolve any addresses including mailhost.pcug.org.au or any
web address including www.pcug.org.au.
Discussion - try all the usual things - check the line for crackling
sounds, unplug other phones, try another ISP such as a free before 8am
TPG account for comparison. Typing PPP is the same as PPP DEFAULT.
Don't press F7 too quickly when the funny characters start appearing
on the black dial-up screen after typing PPP. It may be disconnecting.
Chess Krawczyk offered to email a spreadsheet containing screen dumps
of all set up boxes (now received by Lance thanks Chess).
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{5.Update on CD Burners - Rod Smith
s/w - Nero good and bad; Adaptec ditto.
USB - unreliable
IDE - bit better
SCSI - better still, but $$
Best disk->CD not CD->CD [for me (av) its always been CD->drink coaster]
Switch off screensaver and anything else you can including power saver (and
the nut behind the keyboard and mouse).}
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6 & 7 - from Chess
PENTIUM 4p
On 17th July INTEL announced its new Pentium 4 Processor and i845 chipset
which will become the new standard for personal computing for the next 12
months and make obsolete the 9 generations of Pentiums that we are using
today. This CPU is on a new Flip Chip Pin Gate Array [FC PGA] [Socket]
with 478 pins instead of the 423 pins prior or the famous Socket 370 (pins)
that we have upgraded so many times.
The i845 chipset makes this important because it introduces the 400 MHz
Front Side Bus instead of the 133 MHz of the i440BX chipsets. The
motherboard is faster!. And it uses SDRAM instead of RAMBUS RDIMM which
few persons wanted to adopt.
Also important is the fact that INTEL has not had many sales of the RAAMBUS
based mtherboards or of the earlier Pentium 4 CPU so they are going to drop
the price below the equivalent price for a 1 GHz Pentium III.
http://www.intel.com/pentium4/index.htm?iid=update+010914&
What they should have done is release a DDR memory based chipset but they
have chosen to delay this past July 2002.
USB FLASHDRIVE
It is now possible to put FLASH MEMORY on a key chain, finger sized device
which attaches to the USB port and is seen as a removable hard drive. The
16 MegaByte sample that was passed around costs $99, with sizes going up to
512 Megabytes and even 1.2 GigaBytes of storage. With the suitable driver
installed, it can be used to copy data between machines: 16 MB is
equivalent to 11 floppy disks; 512 MB is almost a CD full.
www.flashusb.com
WINDOWS 98 DRIVERS
After Formatting C: or re-installing WINDOWS 98, 98SE etc, you have to
install device drivers for all you internal and external devices. Most
Plug and Play devices and some thrid party hardware companies have drivers
on the WIN DOWS 98 CD-ROM.
Some do not and you have to supply drivers provided with your motherboard,
video card, modem, monitor and whatever else you have.
In the CONTROL PANEL\ADD/REMOVE HARDWARE you get to a screen that asks you
for your driver location, FLOPPY, CD-ROM or Other/Browse. There is also a
box you can tick while connected to the Internet so that the program can
access the database of drivers supplied to Microsoft. This is a convenient
way when you cannot lay your hands on the floppy, CD or whatever other
media came with the hardware.
I recommend that you have a folder/directory called Hardware where you make
a copy of all your device driver and back them up onto a CD ROM for the
next time you format C:! Check the manufacturer's website for the latest
versions, they probably have fixed the problem which has been palquing you
for the past 3 years.
[Later email from Chess]
Forgot to add reference to
www.approved.com.au/win98maint
The guide for fixing Windows 98.
NOT Win 95, WIN NT or WIN 98 ME.
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{8. U3A Computer Courses 2002 - Mike Dinn
I think Mike was after comments and offers of assistance - I missed much of
this item. His email address may conceivably be mike@dinn.com.au though
quite possibly that is a broken link to my piece of paper.}
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9. Windows 98 drivers - Chess
See items 6 & 7 - I've merged them and too lazy to cut/paste now as I just
dropped my cordless mouse.
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{10. Email with photo attachments - Ted
Lost other attachments when looked at first one with netscape, has
regularly receive multiple photo attachments without problems.
No solutions/suggestions found, at least not recorded by me.}
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{11. Network 'Save As' from drive to Drive - Name not recorded/remembered
(NNRR)
Was 2 problems -
(a) mapping network drives
I gave NNRR a demo of mapping to drive letters after meeting
(b)Wanting to save automatically to multiple drives/locations
No general method believed available. Various special case h/w and/or s/w
solutions mentioned but not recorded by me - and most of us not into RAID
for home use.}
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{Quickie addons:
Scanning/Printing.
Complex topic lots of variables. Possibly some advantageof having same
brand (& similar age/tech level?) of scanner and printer.
Ken Meadows & others gave report on usage of transACT [OK but problems with
netspeed for last couple of weeks.
File downloads 8-10 times faster than modem. Web pages a bit faster.
ISP charge plan of unlimited time 300MB/month, 22c/mb over limit ===>
beware as could download 300MB in about 3 hours.
Tick is a program which can log usage - downloads, time etc}
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