Meeting 8 August 2000


Notes for Coffee and Chat Tuesday  8th August at Belconnen ACT

A show of hands for volunteers to chair the meetings included
Kevin G, Jim H, Rod B, Trevor F Terry B, Ken M., Mike D - any others ??.

John S in the chair, notes by Ted M
The meeting began at 10 am.
Charlie The treasurer said  adequate funds were  available.
No new members were present

1. Esther." TIP cut off"
She often has to redial. Expensive.
Answer : The new Sun work station for PCUG internet access is being fine
tuned. Some of Kryten "modems" may still have some problems. Try TPG free.
Redial, check the lines yourself or have Telstra check telephone lines '
Darryl said use another ISP as well as PCUG, or use the 10 minute PCUG
service of TIP . Or use TPG a free ISP available from 12 to 8 am. Also See
TIP help file at PCUG for causes of dropouts and troubleshooting.



2. Trevor F "Isolated problems with connections to TIP"
Show of hands indicated most have few problems even with 56k modems.
Merv said the server is very fast with mail currently. 12,000  modems were
lost in the lightning strike before last. in Canberra.
Darryl said borrow another modem or use  a 36k modem. Others said borrow
the Maestro modem at Belconnen. Jeremy B's instructions in TIP help pages
have ways of checking the line connection.
Merv said to type in DOS mode " ping pcug.org.au " and the line will be
tested.Mike D said to disconnect all other phones and see if it improves.

3. Mary "Windows errors"
On booting two error panels appeared. " Error MSN DLL... .. illegal program"
Answers, use free software called 'Easycleaner' to remove unwanted
pointers, Owen offered to help her directly.

4. Darryl mentioned ADSL high speed permanent Internet connection services.
One costs  $ 78 per month  256k rate down  and 64k  rate up.  A separate ISP is
needed?  ISDN costs $8000 per month? ASDL costs given.  John S said that
ASDL had three levels of service. Greg said one needed to be less than
4 kilometres from the nearest exchange.

Darryl also said that CASE had a meeting on Saturday the 26th August with a
talk by Dr Robert Long about Viruses  entitled "Is it safe".  It will be
held at Building 2 at ANU. The map is available at the Case site at
www.case.com.au
Darryl said that he had experienced 6 computer attacks per month. If
permanently using the Internet, Virus and other attacks will become much
more common.
Rod said that "Zone of Alarm" software tests whenever data leaves your
computer but Roger said that the messages and checking occurred every time
and checked every cookie. This could become tedious. Ken said that both
Transact and Telstra may (Will! Ed) be expensive.

5. Ken asked re Word 97 formatting. It won't let him format his way, which
he admits change with his needs from time to time.  Al K said that W2000 uses
unicode (2 bytes per character).  Mike said this was also a problem with a
book that he edited. The "styles" feature was mentioned as a way out, with
any style you can create able to be stored. Ted said that there was a normal
style built in. He had created styles including 14 point text, 5x7 card with
large bullet formatted  text, forms and tables styles that he used but only
had to create them once..

6. Jim said that he couldn't find some fonts in Word 97.  Office has limited
fonts. He had to cut and paste from  Word 2000. Merv said that access to
fonts was a problem and some versions of word had a different font structure and
were not necessarily interchangeable.

7. Roger said that he had to Format  his hard disk. It involved 25
reboots and took 5 hours.  The computer was now ok and had all his data on
his D: drive and the operating system on C:.

8. a. Rod had an "Associations   Problem"  ie a PDF file is not associated
with the Acrobat 4 application. Terry said use  'Easycleaner' or 'Regcleaner' (free
software)  to remove old registry  references to Acrobat 3 (Should have been
removed before installing Vrs 4). Manually, associations can be changed
(with some difficulty) by going to View|Folder options|File Types  in
Windows Explorer. JohnS mentioned that an easier solution is to use a
specialised program such as the shareware "Associate"  available from
http://members.aol.com/ron2222
b.  A Blue screen problem had appeared when he rebooted his computer (24
times in a row).
Answer. A "blue screen of death" can be caused by many things. In W98 go to
System info, remove all boot up programs, but NOT Systray or Explorer.
Terry said to use scandisk and reg restore to restore the computer to the
previous state. (5
previous states are stored).

9. Richard  showed a list of sales of popular computer magazines. It
included APC (the oldest Australian one) which is still top of the list. Aus
PCUSER was also well represented.

10.  Mike mentioned a site with free old UK maps (not Ireland) with 1:10000
resolution. They are from 1856 to 1890. To download them right click to save
a gif file of the map. See  www.old-maps.co.uk.

11. Charlie said that he had found a laptop priced at with 64k memory and
active screen for $1895

12. Owen  asked about the autostart program in CD-ROMs.
One answer was to get the PC magazine CD auto start file and edit  it to
suit his needs.
Another said to see the free program "MyAlbum" which had instructions on how
to do it..




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