Topics discussed at today's meeting. It was chaired by JimH and I volunteered as note collator. Here are the details I received by Friday midnight: 1. jpeg clean - JimH: About JPG Cleaner: JPG Cleaner 95 is a Win32 program for cleaning JPG files from anything that is not picture data. Commonly used programs such as Adobe Photoshop are writing additional information into JPG file that isn't needed for correctly displaying the picture: Texts such as File written by Adobe Photoshop, Creator: PolyView(R) Version 3.32 by Polybytes, LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01 Picture previews (sometimes even bigger than main JPG data!) Color Management data. All this data is useful only when opening the file in program that created it. Other programs such as Internet Browsers are just skipping this data, so the data is downloaded and then thrown away! Just use this program when publishing JPG files on the Internet and your JPG files become smaller (if they contain non-picture data) with NO QUALITY LOSS. http://www.pppr.sk/rainbow/programs.html Jim H chairing the meeting asks that his apologies be accepted for allowing item 11 (backing up) to "drag on " . This issue has been done to death at C& C meetings. Terry B rightly pointed out it is "horses for courses" . and there is no single best solution. 2. Family Tree. There's a free family tree html maker available. The url is listed on my family tree http://www.pcug.org.au/~tfrew/family/index.html - Trevor. 3. Demo - TedM: From Trevor - I noted during the demo the ability to pull down a clock showing the time. Being a fiddler I use CuteClock that resides just above open apps on on my desktop. 4. Annoying behaviour of NAV 2002 - RodB By default Norton Anti-virus 2002 checks outgoing mail as well as incoming mail. With outgoing mail Outlook Express thinks it has sent the mail and records it in the Sent Items folder while NAV then goes on to actually transmit the mail. If there are then problems, for example the server delays for some time in answering, NAV gives up whereas OE gives the user a chance to wait until transmission continues. If NAV does this, it tells the user to resend the item from the Sent Items folder. This seems to me confusing especially for a neophyte user. NAV allows this checking to be suppressed. If you are regularly checking you system for viruses this may be acceptable. I rate it a reasonable risk and have turned off the checking. 5. Drive Image - BobS Having tried to use the Drive Image program included on a CD with the PC Repair Manual, I found that a source drive with 1.8GB of data would not copy to a backup drive, despite having 3.7GB of free space on the backup drive. The source drive is a 15GB partition on a 30GB drive, and the backup drive is 7.8GB. One solution proposed was to repartition the source drive to say 3GB + 12GB before copying. I will try this using "Partition Magic" 6.1. Word problems 6.2. Zone Alarm 6.3. Network - Rob (JohnS to send details of the Microsoft news server). From JohnS: For those of us who use M$ products (who doesn't?), and who have problems from time to time (who doesn't), there are two excellent sources of information to help resolve those problems. In priority order: a. Microsoft knowledge base at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?ln=EN-US&pr=kbinfo As Greg mentioned -the KB is highly searchable (but he must be better at it than I am). b. The Microsoft news groups. There is (at least) one group for (probably) each product. The good thing about these groups is that they are "manned" by MS MVPs (Most Valued Professionals), who actually seem to know what they are writing about (unlike many other news groups where you usually have to sort out a lot of chaff). To subscribe to MS news groups (using Outlook Express) - select Tools|Accounts|News|Add|News and follow the wizard. The address of the server is "msnews.microsoft.com" (no quotes). Then download the names of the groups (there are over 1000 - but it should only take 20 seconds or so). Then select your group and subscribe in the usual manner. But beware! These groups are very busy (often more than 200 messages per day), so you probably won't want to stay subscribed for more than a few days..... 7. More on virus - AllanM 8. Peer to peer, LAN - Net BUI or TCP/IP - PeterH Peter said that he was having difficulty setting up a peer to peer LAN between his PC running Windows XP and his laptop running Windows ME. He asked which protocol was appropriate. He was told that Microsoft no longer supported NetBEUI and that the TCP/IP protocol was the one to use. A word of warning, don't delete TCP/IP as you may need to reinstall Windows to recover it. 9. Quick time player - is it useful or necessary - ElizabethW 10.a. AVG auto update 10.b Fixed swap file - Win95 - PaulH 11. Backup - MikeD 12.a. Markets; 12.b FastFind - Anne. As I wanted to buy a new hard disc I asked where the markets were to be held this weekend. No one seemed to know but John Saxon suggested that I try www.computer fairs.com.au to see if one of these were scheduled. Unfortunately there will not be one until the middle of next month. I also asked how to turn off "fast find" as going to the control panel and stopping it did not work. TerryB told me to try double clicking the icon on the control panel but this didn't work either. This morning I went through all my past issues of "Sixteen Bits" and at the end of one of Terry's articles found the advice to go to the icon for Find Fast on the control panel and double click and pull down the index button and turn off the program. As yet I don't know if this works. From OwenC: I've lost the bit of paper, but pretty sure the next ComputerFairs event is 25 May at EPIC see http://www.computerfairs.com.au/index_about.htm and then go to the schedule. From JohnS: I tried www.computermarkets.com and that gave SAT 18th May at Woden CIT (same as the "handout at the door" leaflet). 13. Good news story - CharlieK Charlie offered the following to show that not all our discussions centred around problems. He had recently priced a computer configuration at a shop in Canberra usually noted for its cheap prices and was quoted $2100. He then got a quote for exactly the same configuration from Today Computers in Sydney (as recommended by Merv) and was quoted $1650. He placed an order over the phone and picked the machine up at the Computer Fair on Saturday. In spite of having little time on Saturday, spending most of Sunday in the garden and a fair bit of time on the golf course on Monday, by Tuesday morning he had the machine fired up, (preloaded with Win 98SE) loaded Win XP, set up the internet connection and had the machine networked to his old machine, and all was working hunky dory - with minor issues to be resolved. What do you get for $1650? Gigabyte 7VTXE motherboard Athlon 1800xp processor 512 meg DDR ram 40 gig Seagate 7200 Hard disk 64 meg Geforce 2 MX400 Video Card Liteon 16X DVD plus software (WinDVD) Creative SoundBlaster Live 5.1 Sound card 1.44 floppy ATX case 17'' Diamond View Monitor 2 x network cards 10 metre cat 5 network cable NB no keyboard or mouse but would have only cost $20 Speakers available at about $30 Regards, Trevor -*"*-.,,.-*"*-.,,.-*"*-.,,.-*"*-.,,.-*"*- "I don't like the fact that doctors are referred to as practicing." -- Janet Schwartz ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/ ******************************************************
Return to the Index or the Coffee and Chat Page