DISCUSSION How come it's March already? Another interesting day chaired by Allan, assisted in the demos by Chess and Emil. First of all, the meeting; 1. Problems connecting to TIP (Jeff). This problem is as described in Allan Milkkelsen's message to tip.general and A solution is to add three commas to the end of the phone number. My Computer Dial-Up Networking Right click on the Icon for your TIP connection Properties and then add the 3 commas at the end of the phone number. 2. How do you past to a newsgroup? If you are able to receive newsgroup postings, then you are able to post to them. Depending on the Newsgroup reader that you have, you will find from one of the menus, Post Follow up message, or Post new message, just have a look around your proggy and try, you won't blow anything up. 3. One of the disadvantages of Internal Modems is that there are no blinking lights to warn you that are or are not connected. However, pulling the plug from the wall will ensure that you are disconnected from TIP. 4. Marion asked about Hotmail, you can read all about it at www.hotmail.com but essentially, if you set up an account with them, you have 10 days to activate it, and if you do not use it for 120 days, your account is terminated. 5. There was also a very good service provided by www.mail2web.com , a Singapore base service that allowed you to read your mail. This was demonstrated by Chess after the discussion. You need to know; Your user ID Your password (I would feel very uncomfortable about this) TIP's mail address, which is mailhost.pcug.org.au 6. Jim introduced the problem of where update management and a lot of discussion followed. The main points being ( as part of a disaster recovery plan). keep a copy of your upgrades. Keep a record of the sequence of upgrades. An (the) ultimate upgrade site was given as; http://www.zdnet.com/ Hopefully you will find it from there 7. The Happy99.exe virus was Chess's tale of woe. The moral of this virus is that all exe files attached to e-mails should be treated as suspect, even if they come from a friend, for as in the case of the happy99.exe virus, your friends do not know they are sending it. 8. Much discussion about viruii (or is it viruses). A number of file extensions can be treated as suspect, exe, com, doc, scr, dll and maybe a couple more. Plain text , .txt or html documents are safe. Simply looking at the web will not give you a virus. 9. As an aside, if you are interested in extensions, see Wayne Corbin's page www.pcug.org.au/~wcorbin/ he has a pdf file there with over 800 extensions named. And you won't get a virus from a pdf file. 10. Which brings us to the point that Jenny raised, what constitutes a download? Once upon a time, in the days of the BBS, that was fairly simple, you downloaded a file. But as Emil pointed out, downloading has a more general connotation of reading stuff on the web without purposely saving what you read. Netscape and MSIE save stuff in your cache whether you know it or not. You can deliberately save a page in other than your cache by going to File|Save As. And if you intend to down load a file, your browser will automatically prompt you as to where you want to save it as well as give you the chance to rename the file. 11. Did you see Rod Farr's message about Dial Up networking monitor? For the actual freeware file, see ; http://www.southdown.co.uk/users/jgrieve/dunmon.zip and for info see http://www.southdown.co.uk/users/jgrieve/dunmon.htm Mike had tried this and found it good, "Look at these gaps in transmission from TIP, there must be something wrong !" he said. Allan took the plunge here and ended the discussion part of the morning where we started, on modems. The gaps in transmission represent a retraining of your modem. Retraining may incur changes in speed, or changes in protocol, or both. If there are too many retrains, you will get a disconnection..... the modems say " Hey, there is something wrong here, let's give up ". And at this point, we all gave up, grabbed another cup of coffee and went to Chess's demo hour. DEMO 1 Firstly Emil demonstrated ICQ, really a first class program and allows you to chat to friends or strangers at your choosing. As it happened, two C&C members were available ICQ wise which showed what was going on. 2. Did you want to know what plug ins were in your Netscape, well just enter about:plugins or about;plugins into the location, and it will tell you. Here are some other abouts, thanks to Allan; about: Displays info for your Netscape version about:authors Not in version 3.0 onwards about:cache Displays contents of Netscape's cache about:global Lists contents of the history file about:marca Picture of Marc Andreessen(sp?) about:mozilla A quote from, "The Book of Mozilla" There was a demo of downloading a plugin, but it was cut short when it turned out to be 15 megs, they're getting big! So another different download was arranged from http://tucows.interact.net.au the file was a little smaller, but as we have a direct link with InterACT, the file came down in seconds. 3. Hardware diagnostics. If you haven't tried it, get your original W95 / 98 disk out, look for (Find) HWdiag, and then run it. The main machine at the PCUG centre was remarkably clean, but when I ran it at home on my machine, I got all sorts of problems, so looks like another sleepless night :-) Actually, that was the first time I had looked at the W95 disk, it has some interesting stuff on it. 4. Other demos were given on creating folders, creating folders in folders, downloading into folders, moving files around within folders, and finally deleting folders. Also there was a demo of using www.mail2web.com , see the Discussion, paragraph 5. Thanks for that Chess, interesting to see one of your correspondents apologising for sending you that happy99.exe virus. 5. As a finale, Lotus Organizer 97 is available for free off PC Magazine. Next meeting I assume is 15 Mar 99, check your Sixteen Bits and maybe we will see you then, and thanks to Allan et al for putting on todays show Owen -- ****************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, inluding archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/pcug/candc/c&c.htm These Archives are now searchable. ******************************************************
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