HALIFAX AREA
       			PERSONAL COMPUTER SOCIETY

           		  NEWSLETTER AUGUST 1995

Meets 4th Sunday of each month, 7:00 pm
     Nova Scotia Community College
     Institute of Technology Campus (NSIT)
     Leeds Street, Halifax, N.S.

24 September Meeting

Intro Topics
     - Windows Feature - Bill Marchant
     - Question and Answer - Rob MacCara
Feature Topic:
Will be announced in the September Newsletter and Looks
now like it will be Windows95   



IN THIS MONTH'S ISSUE:

Announcements

- Next Planning Meeting
- Merger news
- Users groups

Help, Help!
A look at DOS and program help files and systems

Finding the Computer Problem
A few experiences on trying to discover what went wrong with the
computer

The Newsletter
A few notes about what goes into this document

Meeting Schedule 95/96
Meeting dates for the upcoming meeting year


GENERAL INFORMATION

This document is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who
has attended a meeting within the past three months.  Yearly
membership dues are $15.00.  The text of the newsletter is
available on ATAB 435-0751, (8N1) and other local bulletin
boards.
Society Mailing Address -
     P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8
Executive
     Chairperson - David Potter
     Vice-Chair - Bill Marchant - 477-2069 (h)
     Secretary/Newsletter Editor - Colin Stuart - 461-0370 (h)
     Treasurer - Garth Bennett - 492-3368 (h)
     Disk Librarian - Thayne MacLean - 461-0082 (h)
     and but not least Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Arthur
     Layton, Rob MacCara, Andy Cornwall, George Richards, and
     Diane Smith


ANNOUNCEMENTS

We have only a few announcements for this month's issue.

Last Planning Meeting
This was held on June 5th and was followed by the General
Meeting.  The next planning meeting will be held on the 5th  of
September, at 7:30 pm at the Institute of Technology Campus.

Merger - HAPCS - ACWPUS
There has been a proposal that the Atlantic Canada WordPerfect
User Society (ACWPUS) and the Halifax Area Personal Computer
Society should merge.  The proposal under discussion is that
ACWPUS should become a Special interest Group as a part of HAPCS. 
Discussion between the two groups is continuing.

If you desire input to the proceedings, or more information
contact Bill Marchant at 477-2069 or ab884@chebucto.ns.ca  by
e-mail.

ACWPUS members may contact Therese Mackintosh at 435-5456 or
aa169@chebucto.ns.ca by e-mail.

Membership Expiry Dates
For those of you who are not already aware, the membership expiry
dates are printed in the upper right corner of your newsletter
mailing label.  If you wish to continue to receive this
newsletter and know what interesting meetings are coming up, you
either have to renew ($15 per year) or come to the meetings and
put your name on the list that is passed around.

DELPHI
The Delphi User's Group meets on the first Tuesday of each month
at the office of Maritime Life on the Dutch Village Road (near
the rotary) in Halifax, at 7:00PM.  The next regular meeting will
be on 5 September.

There was a special meeting on 21 August (at the same time and
place) when Ben Rigo of Borland International was present to talk
to the members.

For more information call Carey Rolfe at 462-4551 or on e-mail
crolfe@fox.nstn.ns.ca.

OS/2 Users Group
Meets the second Tuesday of each month at 7:00 pm.

Those who are interested in attending should contact Carey Rolfe
at 462-4551 or E-Mail crolfe@fox.nstn.ns.ca for date and time
confirmation.

Advertising and Want Ads
We don't charge for small individual want ads like the one above. 
That is any Society member or other interested person with some
computer related item that they wish to sell, trade, or give away
can contact the editor to place an ad in the newsletter.  We
would expect that more commercially oriented advertising provide
the Society with some remuneration for carrying the ad.

An ad will normally only appear once but let me know if you need
it repeated.  Ads can be given to me at meetings or give me a
call two weeks to ten days before the next general meeting
(newsletter deadline).


HELP! HELP!

By W.T. Marchant

On-line help used to be rather rare.  Software houses provided
manuals, and "README" files which their customers were urged to
read before they used the programs.  Many of us remember
searching (sometimes for hours) to find some way of doing a
particular process with Lotus 123 or WordStar. Often the most
efficient way to get an answer was to contact someone else who
used the product, and ask for help.

With the large and rapid increase in the amount of memory in the
average new computer, and the rapid decrease in the cost of hard
disk storage, two things have happened.  First, there is room in
memory for the programs which are required to operate the on-line
help systems, and second, the cost of storing a large manual on
disk is now less than the cost of purchasing that same manual in
paper form.  Many new products offer the manuals on paper at
extra cost, and provide disk versions only.  Consider that a 1000
page manual might cost $50.00,  and that the same manual can be
stored on disk in say 5 Mbytes of memory,  If your new One Gbyte
hard disk cost $300.00, then the manual will use one twentieth of
your hard disk space or $15.00.  This would seem to be a bargain
all round.  I for one will miss being able to take a manual to a
comfortable chair and peruse some portion of it in search of
"gems".  Sitting at a terminal to read a book is still not my
idea of relaxation.  However, since the reality is that help is
on the disk, we should know how to use it.

Recent versions of DOS have provided two kinds of  on-line help. 
The first is the traditional method of typing the DOS command
name followed by a slash and a question mark thus;  /?.   MS DOS
now refers to this as FASTHELP.  This provides a quick summary of
the switches available with that command, and the syntax used to
affect them.  Usually this is enough to get you going, and it is
fast because the computer spends only a small amount time finding
the subject.  The Second is the DOS HELP command which brings up
a screen of text listing all the subjects for which help is
offered.  You type HELP at the DOS prompt, and you are presented
with a screen showing all the subjects and DOS commands you might
wish to know about.  You select the one you want with the mouse
or keyboard, to get the details.  

The selection of the subject from the DOS HELP screen is an
implementation of a technique known as HYPERTEXT.  This system
allows the person composing the system to connect words in his or
her text with other explanations located elsewhere in the text. 
In the DOS HELP system, words connected by hypertext are shown in
a pair of brackets that look like this (some words).  Selecting
(some words) would switch you to an explanation of what "some
words" really meant. Hypertext also usually allows you to go back
to the text you came from, and continue your reading.  The DOS
HELP screen for each subject (with a few exceptions) allows you
to select different screens for NOTES, EXAMPLES and SYNTAX.   In
fact, if one had the patience and the ability to remember
everything he or she read (regardless of the order in which it
was read), there would be no need for courses on the subject. 
The fact is, that everything you need to know about DOS is
somewhere in the DOS HELP.

WINDOWS help follows the HYPERTEXT model, and in that respect is
easy to use.  In most applications there are two types of help. 
First is the help available from the "Help" item on the
application menu.  This system offers further help selections
such as "Contents",  "Search for Help On..", and "Index", as well
as other selections unique to that application.  Of all the
selections on this menu you will probably use "Search for Help
On.." the most.    The difficulty here is knowing what things are
called.  For example, if you have been using Lotus123, and now
you are exploring Quattro Pro, you will not get any help by
looking for the subject "Range".  You have to know that in
Quattro, these are called "Blocks".  Practice will help, but a
nice manual to read at your leisure would be very useful.  Maybe
that is why the after market book business is so busy.

Second is the help which is available when the user presses the
F1 key.  The F1 key help is often referred to as "In-context"
help.  This means that the help offered is based on where you are
in the application.  Some applications are better than others at
attempting to read your mind, but none are very good.  The best
use of  F1 is when you need more help on what a menu selection
will do, or how you use a particular selection.  In Quattro Pro
5.0 and Microsoft Word 6.0 for example when you highlight a menu
item (use the down arrow key to do this), and then select F1, you
will get a reasonably good explanation of what that menu item
will achieve for you.  You will also get a hypertext connection
to more detail about what you can do next.  The F1 key also
provides help from dialogue boxes.

Help for windows applications can only get better.  Experience
with what customers require is leading to improvements all the
time.  One of the big difficulties with Windows Help is that it
is still rather difficult for a programmer to implement.  It
takes a number of special tools and techniques and some
experience in order to do it well.  The result is that some of it
is not being done as well as it should be.  We also have to
remember that the program cannot possibly read the user's mind. 
If we want help on something we haven't done yet, we need to know
what to ask for in the index. To repeat the last sentence of my
first paragraph; often the most efficient way to get an answer is
to contact someone else who is using the product, and ask for
help.

Hope you are having a nice summer.  See you in September.


FINDING THE COMPUTER PROBLEM 

By Colin Stuart

What to write about?  I have drawn a bit of a mental block over
the past few weeks and have found it somewhat difficult to think
up something that might be of interest to the readers of the
newsletter.  I get ideas from things that I do to my computer or
to other ones.  So this month I had to do some thinking back in
time to see if there was anything that happened that might be
good to write about.

For those of you who are not aware, I now work in the MIS section
in the Department of Education (have for over a year now).  There
have been a few interesting events here relating to figuring out
what went wrong with various computers.  So I thought that I
might relate one or two of these here.

Some weeks ago I got a panic call from some people (they will go
un-named). The person calling said "there is smoke coming out of
the monitor -- help what do I do!"  I told the caller to turn the
whole computer off right away and I would come and take a look at
it.

I said to the other guy who works with me, in my best Bart
Simpson voice "cool - a computer's on fire" and proceeded to
check it out with the associated visions racing through my head. 
I had seen a monitor "blow up" before - in fact it was mine that
went kaput right in front of me.  What I found was quite
interesting.  The monitor had not caught fire.  I actually turned
it on to see what would happen.  No smoke, no flames, nothing
wrong with the monitor.  Good thing because it was one of those
big NEC MultiSync 5D's.  But you could smell this lovely burnt
electrical smell all over the area.

Must be something inside the case I thought.  I sometimes feel
like a detective when I am trying to figure out what is wrong
with a computer.  I should get one of those Sherlock Holmes hats
and a pipe.  But I digress from the topic at hand. Upon opening
the case I noticed that one of the ribbon cables had partially
melted.  That is to say it looked like someone had taken a hot
knife and split it lengthwise down the middle.  A clue!  Sort of
obvious or what.  This cable was an internal SCSI cable linking
the NEC triple speed CD-ROM drive and the SCSI controller card. 
So I removed it.  Had to tug it off the CD a bit.  (Another clue
for later.)

I disconnected the CD power and tried to boot the computer - no
success.  It would not go past where the SCSI controller BIOS was
loaded.  Upon removing the SCSI card the reason for this failure
became obvious.  There were burn marks on one of the traces on
the card and a few blacked components.  Cool.  The computer
booted up fine on the next try.  I was wondering if the bus on
the motherboard had been damaged so I tried another card in that
slot later on to see if everything was okay and it was luckily.

So Watson, what had gone wrong?  What would cause something like
this?  Well the reason was right in front of me.  When I removed
the SCSI card from the computer I noticed a cable attached to the
back of the card.  I first thought that it must be some external
SCSI device - there was a scanner around the desk someplace under
all the paper.  Then I looked a bit closer.  No the scanner was
not a SCSI device.  It had its own adaptor card.  Hum what now? -
follow the cable and see where it leads.  Gee, I should have been
a rocket scientist.

It turned out that the cable was a parallel cable and was
attached to an A/B switch box which was in turn attached to a big
laser printer.  Hoped the printer still worked and it did.  This
was the cause of the problem.  One of the pins in the parallel
cable must lead to a ground through the laser printer or switch
box and it drew power from the CD-ROM drive down along the SCSI
cable, through the adaptor card and out along the parallel cable. 
Wow.

How could someone do this?  Well the external connector on the
SCSI card looked exactly the same as a parallel port.  The person
had moved the computer the day before and just plugged the
printer cable into the first port that looked right.  It had a
small label on the back of the card which identified it as a SCSI
port but who reads labels, eh?  So with that solved the next step
was to check the CD-ROM drive to see if it still worked.  I
opened it up so I could get a look at the circuit board.  No, she
was toast.  More burned traces and blackened little bits.  The
clue I mentioned above - well the connector on the drive had
melted black plastic on it.  The cable had fused with the
connector centered around one pin.

That was one of my more memorable recent computer experiences. 
It shows what can possibly happen if the wrong thing gets plugged
into the wrong port.

On to another call.  Last week I was called to check out a
computer that was having continuous problems.  When I got there I
decided to give the machine a complete checkout.  I first scanned
for viruses and then tried to run some diagnostics and see what
showed up.  Normally I run these off a bootable floppy but the
computer refused to boot off the disk.  It just locked up with
the little drive LED glowing away at me.

Oh - oh.  Opened up the case.  Tried a new floppy drive, same
thing.  Changed the controller card and the same thing happened. 
Changed cables.  Spent more than half-an-hour messing with this
thing and nothing seemed to work.  That is  until as it was
booting up I looked at the screen.  I had checked the CMOS to
ensure that the boot sequence was A then C but hadn't checked
everything.  There on the screen was the problem.

I had a work experience student with me.  She didn't see it
either.  Many computers display the CMOS setup and devices on the
screen as they boot up.  This one showed the hard drive and
serial, parallel ports but the floppy drive was set to "1.2MB
5.25".  Argh!

Booted just fine once I fixed that.  The computer has some other
problems but I haven't figured them out yet.  I switched it with
a new one and got the person back operating again and will run
assorted diagnostic programs on it to try and see what is wrong.

Another interesting case was the computer that munched floppies. 
Didn't actually eat them up but any disk that was put into this
machine came out with many of the files being mangled.

Hum - what could do this?  The problem first showed up while
using WordPerfect for Windows 6.0a.  Files would be damaged and
unreadable or would have strange problems.  They thought it was
WordPerfect but a check lead me to believe it was something else. 
I was able to gather more clues when I discovered that the
computer would not do a proper format of a floppy.  It got all
the way to the end and then locked up when it tried to write the
root directory.  I tried to copy files back and forth and this
worked.  Strange, when I tried xcopy the computer just quit -
locked right up.

The usual diagnostics said everything was fine.  As in the
previous case I changed the floppy, controller and cables but
this did little to curb its appetite.

I next tried a comprehensive floppy test using Norton's NDIAGS,
version 8.0.  This didn't get very far before failing on the DMA
channel.  Hah!  Did the same with different controllers.

The problem - a bad DMA controller and the solution was to 
replace the motherboard.  Luckily it was under warranty.

So I think that I will end this at this point.  I will try to
look up a few more computers disasters or problems that I
encounter.


ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER

Newsletter Articles
We are almost always in need of good articles.  If anyone has
something that they feel would make a good article, an
interesting story to tell, or even a good meeting topic, please
don't hesitate to pass it on.

Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI
Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect. 
How does one get an article to me?  Various ways are available. 
You can bring it to a meeting or give me a call and upload it to
me.  If you are on the Chebucto FreeNet, Internet, or any type of
e-mail system that has a gateway to the Internet, you can send
something to me via the internet to where I work -
hlfxtrad.educ.stuartce@gov.ns.ca

It does work, that is how a number of articles in previous
month's editions were received, but if you are sending a file
attachment to your message, it should be UUencoded and not a mime
attachment.

Newsletter Production Notes
As usual , for those who may be interested, the newsletter was
formatted this month with WordPerfect for Windows 6.1 running on
either a 386SX-25 or a 486DX-33 (each has 8mb of RAM).  Much of
the clipart used is from Novell (formerly WordPerfect)
Presentations 3.0.

The original was printed at 600 dots per inch resolution on a HP
Laserjet 4M.  If I don't have access to this printer then we
print it on an Okidata 850 at Bits and Bytes on Queen Street in
Dartmouth where they allow the Society to print the originals at
no charge.

The main body of the newsletter is set in 10 point Palatino with
the article headings being 14 point bold.  The title on the first
page is ITC Zapf Chancery Medium Italic 19.2 and 16 points.

There was about the same number of copies made this month as
compared with the last few months, with about 80 copies produced
of which around just under 70 were mailed out.  Any extra copies
from the previous few months issues that I have will be brought
to the next meeting for those who are new to the group or may not
be in regular attendance.

I do have a complete set of all the previous newsletters and if
someone wanted to look through these, let me know and I can bring
them to the next meeting.


MEETING SCHEDULE - 95/96

We decide on the meeting dates for upcoming year at the last
planning meeting.  The dates for these are listed below. 

24 September
22 October
26 November
7 January
28 January
25 February
24 March
28 April
26 May
23 June

As in previous years, the December meeting is moved to the early
part of January due Christmas Eve being the fourth Sunday of the
month.

The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8
days) after the general meeting.  They are also located at NSIT,
normally in a small boardroom to the left as you come in.  Anyone
is welcome to assist in the planning of future meetings or
events.

Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where
possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this
newsletter.