Coffee and Chat Notes (Southside) Tuesday 3/7/2000 The meeting Started at 10 am in the Irish club at Weston. Jim offered to chair the meeting. 23 people attended. Eric the treasurer said money was in hand. Eric was appointed one of four to sign for financial matters. John ( K) talked about Vet newsletter re viruses. The IPE version was free, Vet Super cost $40 worked with Win V3.1 and was well maintained by Internet updates. See www.vet.com.au John updated Vet every Monday. John S said how to detect a virus by its characteristics. Basically don't open attachments that were unexpected or had suspicious names. Run a virus checker first. Jeff spoke about the need for helpers at the Belconnen library. Merv spoke about Telstra billing and the need to check for errors as he thought that one phone call resulted in multiple charges possibly due to relay of calls to several exchanges .. Rod spoke about 'Access' and some problems. Messages never made it to news groups. No attachments should be sent to a newsgroup message. ' Kryten has some very fast periods and had improved. Graham and Ted Had very fast download segments on occasions. Jim spoke about dropouts Merv and John said that modem technology was at the edge of reliability. Kryn spoke about slow imaging with his new scanner. He had thought that he might need to make his computer faster. It was suggested that his problem was probably due to the software being slow. It was mentioned that maintenance with removal of temporary files and registry clean up might help. Ted and others said that with Paintshop pro, the image appeared almost as soon as the scanner had finished with the image. Gloria said that a visit to www.scan.com might help generally for those with a new scanner. John (K) said don't scan at too high a resolution. Merv said a good rule was to scan at half the capacity of the printer. Richard said to start the software first and reduce the DPI scan level. Ted said that he sometimes scans postcard photos and creates 20 to 50 mb images to enlarge them. The image still appears reasonably soon (after less than two minutes) after a somewhat longer scan using Paint shop pro. A short break for ordering lunch was followed by a resumption at 11.10 am. Ted mentioned a problem with a smoke detector which was years old. and the battery worked but it wouldn;t detect smoke. A lively discussion followed. Eugen offered a lot of help. He installed and checked many smoke detectors. He said that he changed batteries every year and tested the smoke detection aspect once a week by using a smoking wooden skewer. He had found no real difference in effectiveness no matter what the price was. Gloria said that CALMS installs detectors for free if you were a pensioner. To stop the smoke detector making a noise one could wave a towel at the device or just wait. Eugen said to not install them in a corner. Ted said that the radioactive element in one of his detectors was Americum 241 with 37Kbq (37 thousand bequerals of radioactive energy) in it.--Americum 241 has a rather long half life of 7,370 years! according to an article he found dated 1998 on the web. Clearly there is some unused radioactivity in the humble smoke detector. Careful disposal would seem necessary even though the radioactivity is low it is very persistent.The effective life of the element in a detector was equally important as the battery life. Perhaps the detector shown at the meeting had insufficient Americum 241 initially and that it why it failed at 5 years and not at about 7,000 years.There is a potentiometer in the device. Maybe they are set to not detect smoke after three years or so. Further there was no warning of the loss of activity of the radioactive element except by testing with smoke. The device made a chirping noise when the battery was running low. A pair of 'RingGrip' devices bought from Woolworths were cheap and were properly labelled. They were warranted for 3 years and the date of manufacture on the label was 18/5/2000. Putting your own label with the date of purchase would help tell when to replace it Richard said that he had trouble with the program 'Real Audio' . John (S) said that program was never time limited but there were two versions a free ware version and a share ware version. Anne had problems with her computer when it stopped when using ' Defrag' It stopped at the 10% defragged level. It gave a message " content changing" Grahame said to wait and stick with it. Merv said to boot up to DOS and from DOS begin defragging the hard drive. i.e. Type at the DOS prompt Scandisk /all or / full . Without windows being in use then this might work. Ann needed was helped with how to go to DOS. Maureen asked if anyone had experience with 'Stockeasy' Version 4, share program. She had a problem with " Date History" John said that he used EasyChart. Eric asked about " the use of Printkey John spoke about the selection and purchase of his computer.It is a Pentium III running at 667mhz, with 128 k of P133 ram. It has a 32 mb videocard (Savage S3 AGP x4) and a case with a 230 watt power supply. It took him half an hour to assemble it but a lot longer to install the software. He had also purchased a 20gig Fujitsu hard drive. The hard disk was partitioned in to three sections. He had problems with all the new gear being recognised by W98 Special Edition 2 , with many reboots being necessary. A problem remains. He is unable to access a bank service. He said that the machine ran quite fast and he had saved a worthwhile amount of money in building it himself.The suspend to Ram was not working and gave a " fatal error " warning. End of notes CnC Southside -------------------------Return to the Index or the Coffee and Chat Page