Meeting 5 August 1997


	A very busy and again, informative day. Mike Dinn started off
by advising that the Seniors Internet Cafe was to get started
September 29, and he was looking for some volunteers to help out. He
will post a message to tip.general  giving the requirements.

	Elizabeth Yardley and John Taylor brought in a copies of
Computer Choice for review; never got a feel for what people thought,
though one comment was that worth buying, but not for "power users"

	Some people use their computer to communicate, do word
processing or play games, Paul Thompson however seems to use his
computer as a frustration machine. His latest adventure saw him buy 16
mb of RAM, only then to lose his CD player, scanner and a couple of
hundred megabytes of disk space off his Western Digital hard drive.
	While he retrieved his CD and scanner, he has had no luck with
the HDD, even Master  Solver Darrell Burkey admitted being stumped.
One suggestion was to try a low level format from the BIOS, so we look
forward to the next meeting to see what new adventures Paul has had.

	Peter Hodge wanted to know about Power Saving for the monitor,
he had it in WFWG, but has now lost it with W95. This facility comes
from the video driver, and it is recommended that the latest driver
for W95 and the video card be obtained. Two options should be
available, "Stand by Mode" and "Turn Off".

	Darrell Burkey had bought a Diamond Speedster, but found a
cheaper video card in MIRO, and found it to be superior than the
Diamond card. Other discussion then started on monitors, the KTX 17"
is quite amazing value and O & A Link sell another 17" monitor which
is outstanding.

	Ergonomics came into it, flicker rate and refresh rate,
headaches and migraines, it is very important to have the monitor at
the right height, particularly if you spend more than a couple of
hours a day in front of a monitor.

	And if you do spend more than a couple of hours staring at a
monitor, and you wear mutifocal glasses, you can now get these to be
made optimal for looking at screens. Jenny Laraman noted that if you
were concerned about your eyesight, there is little point in quibbling
about the cost of a monitor, make sure you have one that is "in
focus", flicker free etc.

	Something about virus detection from Jim Hume, sorry Jim I am
not into viruses, so I missed the technoblurb, which sounded like that
the signature data bank is so big, you need two disks to store the
information, and these are now downloadable from your favourite Virus
Patch Centre.

	With five minutes left, someone asked, "Can you tell me about
digital cameras and how to send pictures on the Internet". Well first
of all, there was in the May issue of PC User, a good rundown on
digital cameras, secondly there are other options, a VCR and video
capture card, and probably cheapest of all, was to simply scan the
photo(s), and attach them to an e-mail.

	A plug for a magazine, this months Australian PC World has a
little book attached to it "Creating Web Pages for Dummies", highly
recommended.

	As promised, Des Pfeiffer gave a run down on  Ink Jet cartridge
refilling, and I will post an article on what I could glean from this
very interesting talk later in the week. For those that missed his
details, he is on phone 287 2000.

	Next meeting will be 19 August 1997, so till then, all the
best.


Owen
	
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