Notes ON C&C Meeting Tuesday 8 September 1998 The Co-ordinator John Saxon welcomed 32 people attending the meeting which commenced at 10 am in the PCUG Centre. Two new members, Eugen and Nigel, were welcomed. John mentioned that he was acting as co-ordinator of Coffee and Chat temporarily in place of Alf McMicken. John knew that others may be interested in filling this rôle permanently. Those present unanimously elected John to the position of Co-ordinator. The subjects discussed were: 1. Satellite imagery on the Internet. 2. MS Works - unexplained spaces. 3. Video capture problem. 4. Photo editing. 5. Scanning of microfiche. 6. Kangarou external drive for laptops. 7. Epson Stylus 800 printer problem. 8. Printing problem with graphics files. 9. Delayed opening of files. 10. Anti-virus updates. 11. Slow verification of username and password. 12. Appointment of Co-ordinator. __________________________ SALLELITE IMAGERY. Nigel asked about remote sensing images on the Internet saying that these are useful for pastoralists in assessing vegetation conditions. Emil referred to a site at http://www.terraserver.com where images could be viewed on screen. GAPS IN TEXT DOCUMENTS. Elizabeth raised a problem where she found a large gap between a graphics image and text that she had added to the page. The text that she initially thought had been lost was found by scrolling down. It was suggested that possibly the spacebar had been accidentally held down causing the gap to appear. It was suggested that a simple way to close the gap may be to place the cursor at the beginning of the gap and to use the delete key a number of times. VIDEO CAPTURE. Paul had a problem with a video capture program that he had loaded on two separate computers using different video capture cards. In each case he was getting an error message saying "set vertical sync. interrupts and see that they are enabled." He was getting a perfect picture on the monitor but could not capture the video. Paul also reported that it is no longer possible to download drivers from the HP web site. The scanner software he needed to reinstall was Deskscan 2. His original disk was corrupted. As the scanner is over 1 year old, HP agreed to replace the disk for $9.75. PHOTO EDITING. Ester passed around a 10"X8" composite picture prepared by Bob from two snapshots that she had of her dog. The picture was of very high quality and depicted two images of the dog with the sun setting over the ocean in the background. Bob gave some pointers on producing pictures of this quality. Firstly it was important at the outset to visualize the size of the final picture and to scan an image of that scale. The file size will be quite large. The quality that you put in is what you will get out. He used a Microtek scanner at 600 dpi. He printed the final image on HP glossy photo paper using an HP 850c printer. He had spent about 6 hours composing and manipulating the image using Adobe Photoshop 5. It was obvious to the group that the result was well worth the effort. Bob had 64MB of RAM on his computer and plenty of hard drive space. There were no short cuts he said. Someone referred to a very good web site giving scanning tips. It can be found at http://www.scantips.com Mike asked if anyone had had any success in scanning microfiche. He had tried scanning microfiche at a setting of 1200 dpi and this was still not enough. Emil suggested that a setting of at least 2400 dpi was required. Colour photographs being scanned for viewing on a computer monitor, for example in web pages, required a setting of only 75 dpi. Wolf asked if anyone had information about a Kanguru PCMCIA card for laptop computers to which you can attach any 2˝" drive. Wolf would like to hear from anyone who has information on the Kanguru card. Peter raised a problem with an Epson Stylus 800 printer that printed out 8 pages of hyphened lines each time that the computer was switched on. If the printer is switched on after the computer boots up there is no problem. It was suggested that there was something in the initialisation string that was activating the printer. It was mentioned that zip drives on the printer port can sometimes confuse printers that have two-way communication. Lynn had a printing problem with graphics files using MS Works. The black and white graphics that she had included in a text document appeared as completely black when printed. It was suggested that she look at changing the print setup properties and see how the document appeared in print preview. Leigh had a problem with files being slow to appear on his monitor. Sometimes there was a long waiting period. There was a possibility that the computer chip was overheating. Temperature could be tested with a finger. Someone suggested that it may be worth running a defrag. Ester asked how to delete McAfee anti-virus software that had been loaded on her computer. It was suggested that she could update the anti-virus program as an alternative to deleting it. Updated signatures for anti-virus programs could be downloaded from Tucows. Norton was said to be a good anti-virus program with free updates of signatures that installed automatically after downloading from the Internet. There have been some serious new viruses appearing in Canberra recently and it paid to update signatures regularly. Greg has put together a new computer using an AMD K6-2 processor and 100Mhz front side bus motherboard. Of course he now has a new Bios and HDD but still has the software running to provide Logical Block Addressing of HDD above 512Mb. He is concerned that if he removes this software - he may not be able to boot. John suggested that he should "go for it" and rename his old Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files so they do not run. It might be necessary to change his CMOS HDD values to auto detect. Jeff said that when he was logging on to tip it sometimes took a long time for verification of his username and password. Geoff said that when he logged on to TIP it took a long time for his >user name and password to be verified. It was mentioned that John had a >posting on tip.general about eliminating the log on to network item in >dialup networking. John has found that some versions of windows default to log onto a network after connection and completion of TIP logon procedures. This is not necessary with TIP. John advised that in My computer|Dial up networking|TIP icon|Properties|Server Types tab - ensure that in Advanced Options "log onto network" is NOT checked. PH 10/8/98 ********************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, including archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/~rcook/c&c.htm These Archives are now searchable. ***********************************************************
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