After the rotten weather yesterday, Tuesday, 4 Jul 94
turned out to be a beautiful day, although a little cold, not
unlike Canberra at this time of the year.

        Gloria Robbins was back in the chair, and a new face,
Peter Hodge was welcomed. A few administrative points,

        A lunch was thought appropiate, and Gloria volunterred to
        organise one at the Brumbolte, in Phillip, possibly 25
        July 95.

        It was voted to buy Whiteboard for use in the PCUG
        Centre.

        Geoff Mierish will give a talk on Tech Assist, probably
        in August.

        A rundown on Thunderbyte, an antivirus program, was given
by Ken Meadows who was a bit dissappointed by the McFee AV program.
Ken found it on the PCUG BBS and had no problem installing it. He
found it "quite alert", offfering warning messages in a number of
situations. He was so impressed with it that he registered it.

        This lead to AV programs for WIN95, apparantley most AV
programs will work on the Beta version of Win 95, but when the
real Win 95 comes along, none will function, and it was reported
that Synmantic will be the first company to offer a AV program
for the full blown Win 95. Also reported was that Uninstall 3
will not work with Win 95, Uninstall 4 is required.

        Ken then gave a run down on a HP Scanner, model 3C. He
drew attention to the latest PC User Magazine, and the good
report given to the HP Model. A number of examples were handed
round, Scans of photos, documents, and other pictures. They had
been printed out on a 300dpi printer, and the quality was super.
The OCR capabilities were excellent, and any minor errors could
be easily picked up using the spell checker in the WP program.

        Again this led to some Win95 discussion, it would appear
that your friendly scanner is not going to work in Win 95 without
some upgrade of the software to accommadate Win 95.


Problems Etc

        One member's bubblejet, when printing from WFW2, produced
wavy printing. A supplier had told him it was a software problem
with WFW2 and he wondered if this was the most likely case. It
would appear that wavy printing was unlikely to be a software
problem, but rather a hardware problem, most likely associated
with the friction drive. "Sandpaper" from the catridge factory
could clean up the friction drive and possibly solve the problem.

        Another member's computer, when first switching on, drops
into the CMOS setup, from which he exits and the machine
continues to boot up normally. This was thought to be a CMOS
setup parameter problem, and nothing to do with a faulty battery.
A low battery would give a couple of beeps before dropping into
the CMOS setup, and you would probably find things like number of
cylinders missing, and need replaceing. It was advisable to have
your CMOS setting written down somewhere.

        Someone thought that MSD could tell if you had a low
battery, but I checked my MSD and could find "battery indicator"
in MSD.

        Cold weather apparantly is a problem, causing some
mechanical parts to freeze up, like the fan and it takes a bit of
time to get it going. One person has solved this problem by
putting an electric blanket over his computer to keep it warm.

        Emil Joseph gave a rundown on the version of Free Agent
he is using (and nobody else has got). He has found the writers
of Free Agent to be attentinve and responsive to users in the
developpment of the reader. This week he expects an announcement
concerning the availability of the commercial version as well as
the version he is using. In short, for US$29 (apparantley
shipping not included) the full blown version will provide

        full e-mail facilites
        spell checker
        compression of news and mails
        twit filters and other facilities

Apparantly, goodbye Eudora.

        Re new software, Emil advised that there was a mail
reader, possibly called "Email Connection", a fairly big program
that leaves Eudora for dead. It is not on the BBS, it cannot be
FTPed, and if you are interested, contact Emil at
ejoseph@pcug.org.au who will advise how and where to get it.
One advantage of this mailer was the ability to take and Excel
spreadsheet and attach the data from it to your message.

        That's it folks for this fortnight, next meeting on the
18 Jul 95.



 Cheers         Owen

 Fidonet        3:620/243
 e-mail         rcook@pcug.org.au

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