Another interesting morning for all concerned.

Netiquette.
	As a general rule, it is considered good form to reply to News
Group items in the Newsgroup to which it was posted. Put another way, it is
bad form to reply by e-mail to the poster (author) and ignore all other NG
readers.  Basically that what NGs are about.

Agent.
	Correctly configured, Agent should bring up the assigned e-mail
program when clicking on an e-mail address, and also the assigned browser
when clicking on a URL. Agent's Help tells you how to do this.

Y2K
	Readers familiar with Jim Fogg's Y2k problem (Excel), found in
tip.help will be interested to know that he has now solved the problem by
discovering two patches that should have been applied to his MS programs.
These patches are available from almost any magazine CD.

HTML in E-mail
	This should probably be in the Netiquette section an applies mainly
to MS outlook Express users who send not only a text form of the e-mail,
but also an HTML version. Not only does this consume double the bandwidth,
it is also very annoying to 75% of the world not encumbered with MS Outlook
express. Switch it off please by View|Internet|Options|Mail|Send and then
tick Send Plain Text, or its equivalent. Thanks Elizabeth for raising this.

IE5Beta
Chess (otherwise known as Format C:) related an amazing saga of how his
beta versions of OE5 and IE5beta finally destroyed his mail system, All
fixed with a format c; and reinstallation of IE4 and OE as supplied  with
his W98.

How To
A "How to" on connecting to the TIP site has been prepared and will be
available soon. (I note that Nhan Tran) has just completed a similar
exercise, so it will be interesting to compare the two documents).

Program extensions.
Double clicking on a file may not activate the file because its extension
may not be associated with a program. You can make this association by
going to:
View|Options|File Types| then start a "New Type"

If however you have an unknown file type, you can try looking at it in a
text editor like Notepad, often you can glean a little sense out of most
binaries, at the start there might be a few words to give a clue, however,
the normal way is to ask:   Where did this file come from? If you don't
know, get rid of it.

 If you do know, go back to the site and see if any special program or
plugin is required to read/execute the file. Download and install as
necessary.

Saving WWW pages
Guy had been saving Internet www pages to floppy disk, and was really
having problems in several areas. It was recommended that he "save as" an
HTML document and to the HDD, preferably to a directory/folder set up for
these saves. Reading from a floppy can be very time consuming if the
calling program creates temporary file and does its tracking on the floppy.
This was demonstrated later.

Virus protection.
This turned into a lively discussion and to summarise.
1.	Turn off Virus protection when on the Internet. Use it when you are
about to run/install the program. Thunderbyte was a very CPU demanding
program and would severely limit download speeds. 
2.	There are virus protectors and virus protectors. It seems that none
will find all viruses, and several people have two or three programs to
check downloads out.
3.	Everyone has their favourite program, get them off the magazine
disks and try them all out.
4.	Make sure you regularly update the virus signatures, and program as
they tend to get better and better at finding viruses.

Windows 3.11
	It was announced last week that W3.11 is no longer supported by MS.
A quote from Bill Gates is apparently "Our greatest competition is the
earlier versions of our programs".

Good Practices.
1. Shut down all unnecessary programs before installing a new program.
Pres Ctrl-Alt-Del, this brings up the Close Program dialogue box, and close
everything except 
	Explorer
	Rundll32
	Systray
2. Use the Setting|Control panel|Add/Remove facility to install.
3. Try and have a dedicated Directory/folder to download into, and install
programs from. 

Conclusion.
That was the talking part almost over, so thanks to Allan for that and next
was a demo by Chess in the Training Room.


Demo.
BIOS. We were shown how to get into the BIOS, how to change it and what a
lot of the settings meant, very interesting stuff.

We were shown the complexities of the registry, and warned not to fiddle
with this unless you knew exactly what you were doing. Other wise you would
most like be up for a Format C:

Periodically make a StartUp disk, and we were shown how to do this.( As an
aside ... Loose cables are generally the first thing to check if something
doesn't work)

A page full of Russian (cryllic) text was saved as an HTML document and
then opened in the browser from the File|open menu just to demonstrate that
these things could be done.

A free chinese post card was ordered from http://www.bluemountain.com

And there was more, an  interesting morning all round. The next Internet
SIG is scheduled for Monday, 1 March 1999, 10:00am-12:00pm at the PCUG
Centre.



-- 
Owen




	

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