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Intro Topics
Hard Disk Installation - Colin Stuart
Question and Answer - Bill Marchant
Feature Topic:
What's Cool For Christmas
Guest speaker from A-Plus Software
IN THIS MONTH'S ISSUE:
Announcements
Pretty Is a Picture
Graphic images on the Internet
Windows 95 Manuals Microsoft Forgot
Decisions, Decisions
Whether or not to upgrade?
Format
How to format floppy disks
What Are Those Beeps For?
More on hardware problems
The Newsletter
A few notes about what goes into this document
Meeting Schedule 95/96
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 Chebucto Community Net and local bulletin boards.
Society Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 185 Stn. Main, Dartmouth N.S., B2Y 3Y3
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 also Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Arthur Layton, Rob
MacCara, Andy Cornwall, George Richards, and Diane Smith
ANNOUNCEMENTS
We have a number of fairly important items this month's
announcements.
We owe our thanks to Diane Smith who negotiated the details on
behalf of the Club. Reservations for the desired space have been
made until the end of June 1996.
There is underground parking available at the VMH at a cost of
$1.10 /hour. For anyone who wishes to use it, the elevator from
the parking area takes you directly to the lobby. The parking
bill is paid to the concessionaire in the lobby when you go to
return to your car. There is also parking available on the
nearby streets. Both Robie Street and Summer Street have parking
meters, and at our meeting time on Sunday evening they are most
likely to be uncontested by others.
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 Metro Halifax Delphi Developers Group meets on the first
Tuesday of each month at 7:00pm. The meetings are held at the
CCL Group Building 2669 Dutch Village Road, Halifax.
Further information may be obtained from Dave Hackett at
835-3894, CIS:71650,2646 or from Carey Rolfe at 462 4551 or
e-mail
rolfe@ra.isisnet.com.
OS/2 Users Group
The regular meeting of the Greater Halifax OS/2 Special Interest
Group are held on the second Wednesday of each month at the
office of IBM at Purdy's Wharf Tower Two in Halifax. Further
information may be obtained from Donovan Long at 422 1975 or by
e-mail at tsst@isisnet.com.
Advertising and Want Ads
We don't charge for small individual want ads. 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).
PRETTY IS A PICTURE!
By David L. Potter
ab934@chebucto.ns.ca
Members of the Chebucto Community Net have started to show a lot
of pride of ownership' when it comes to their Profile/HomePage.
This week I undertook a search for CCN members who have added
graphic images to their HomePage'. (Chebucto uses the term
profile' but most of the Internet community would consider it to
be a HomePage'.)
To do this, I initiated a search - g(o) people' looking for the
text string img' (no quotes for either command. The go shortcut
can be used to search for any text string that might be found on
the HomePage'... a search for garden' (remember not to use the
quotes...) Should find members who are interested in gardening
along with members who live on Spring Garden Rd. (And have
included their address).
The text string img' is used in html documents to identify an
"image" which might be a photo, a graphic that says "Cool" or a
multi-coloured line. This would usually appear as:
<img alt="Cool!" src="cool.gif">
There are all sorts of variations and formatting that can be applied to
images but we'll leave that for another day... ;-)
Anyway... I found about 140 CCN members who have included images
as part of their HomePage.
So how do people with a text-only connection to the Internet
create pretty pages? The simple way for anyone with Windows (TM)
is to download a graphic browser such as Netscape (TM), prepare
the pages at home and then upload the .html files and image files
to CCN.
And where do people get these images... I expect most images are
either created using a paint' program or are scavenged from
other sites. Some images that can be found on the Internet are
copyright but others can be used without restriction. In the
first instance, common sense should tell you whether an image
can be borrowed... however if you are in doubt you can usually
send E-mail to the site owner to request permission or confirm
who owns the graphic file. For the most part... the little balls
and lines that are found in many places are fair game...
How to retrieve them...
With the CCN Lynx Browser you can...
First.. identify the filename/location. This is accomplished by
pressing the =' key to find the location of the page you are
currently viewing, and then pressing the \' key to reveal the
source code for the page to find the filename of the image.
=' will say... Current file: /chebucto.ns.ca/~ab934/Profile.html
\' will reveal that the image file is "/gif/cool.gif" (note that
I have created a subdirectory called /gif)
To retrieve the file you will create a html link that
specifies... (the html version really works... ;-)
David's cool.gif
...and execute that link....
Lynx will say..."Unable to display this file... Download or
Cancel" If you select Download you will be able to download
the file cool.gif.
*****
Netscape users can simply enter the url...
http://chebucto.ns.ca/~ab934/gif/cool.gif
...and then use the Save as...' command to retrieve the image
that is displayed.
*****
_Good Surfing!
THE WINDOWS 95 MANUALS MICROSOFT FORGOT
By John Howard Oxley
Anyone who uses Microsoft's WINDOWS 95 quickly notices that the
manual supplied with the operating system is, to put it mildly,
insufficient. The manual serves [by intention] as a brief
introduction only -- what previously would have filled hundreds
of pages of paper are now on-line as "HELP" files. But you may
need help when you're not near the computer, or because your
system is down, in which case on-line help cuts no mustard
whatsoever. Furthermore, there is always something left out from
the "official version", no matter how hard Microsoft tries [and
because documentation is not a source of dollars, Microsoft is
not alone in not trying very hard].
The after market has been quick to notice this, so we probably
have a faster, larger deluge of WINDOWS 95 books than anything
since DOS 5 upgrades appeared sans manuals. Since Sturgeon's Law
["90% of everything is crud"] applies to computer books too, I
thought a glance at two good titles might be useful, so I
interrupted my irregular shareware columns to give readers a
quick scoop.
The computer book clubs have gotten into vending W95 titles in a
big way. The most recent flyer from The Computer Book Club has a
dual selection of Brian Livingstone & Davis Straub's Windows 95
Secrets and Tom Sheldon's Windows 95 Made Easy for a combined
price which will probably come to about CAD$75.00 with shipping.
About 2 months ago, The Small Computer Book Club had a combined
selection with the Livingstone/Straub book and Alan Simpson's
Windows 95 Uncut for a combined price of CAD$84.00 all expenses
paid, and that's the package I went with [the Simpson book is
larger and has more features than the Sheldon book, so it cost
more]. Given that the OTC price at a local bookstore for the
Livingstone/Straub - Simpson combination was about CAD$135.00,
the book clubs undercut list prices considerably. But are the
books really worth even the reduced price?
Windows 95 Uncut comes with a CD-ROM; the intended audience is
someone who has basic PC competence, and wants to learn how to
use WINDOWS 95. This book is essentially a better-written manual
replacement [though it does introduce tips and tricks] devoted to
showing one how to use the operating system. Topics covered
include the basics, how to personalize your desktop [and with
WINDOWS 95, this can be a full-time task!], growth and
maintenance, business applications, mobile computing, connecting
to the InterNet and other services, LANs, and significant
separate issues [multimedia, using Microsoft Exchange, The
Registry {two words which will strike terror into the hearts of
anybody familiar with the concept} and corporate considerations].
Appendices cover installation, references, Microsoft Plus [oh,
you DO have some unused hard disk space, well...] and the
included Companion CD-ROM .
What I have read of this is good, sound, sensible advice, without
obvious error. It's not a lot of help when things go wrong [e.g.
a W95 fonts problem has me at my hair's end, but the fonts
section covers only 10 pages, and says nothing about
trouble-shooting]. The CD-ROM, in contrast, is no particular
prize,
smacking strongly of the "shovelware" approach [a large number of
the programs are DOS tools which can't even be run in WINDOWS
95!]. Perhaps the best index of comparison between this and the
Livingston/Straub title lies in how the CD-ROM is handled -- a
whopping 122 of this book's 832 pages are devoted to describing
what's on the CD-ROM, almost 15 times the number of pages so used
in the Livingstone/Straub book. Overall, I would give Simpson's
book a B+; it's probably better than many of the other titles out
there.
Windows 95 Secrets also comes with a CD-ROM; the audience is
people with some experience of WINDOWS who may be having problems
with WINDOWS 95. It is not intended to replace the manual so
much as extend it, and discusses a variety of issues one needs to
know to make the best of the operating system. Topics include a
short [100 page] section on introduction and installation, over
200 pages on the user interface, nearly 100 pages on using DOS in
W95 [which for many will be worth the price of the book alone],
nearly 300 pages on plug-and-play [or how devices cooperate so
nicely with W95...], 180 pages on communication, and 8 pages on
the CD-ROM shareware included with the book.
Anyone familiar with Brian Livingstone's writing will not be
disappointed with this title -- it represents the same sort of
tough, detailed digging combined with a clear expository style
which has made the author's name a byword in the Windows world.
This is very much a book to consult when something goes wrong,
only granting that you have the time to consult it [the font
pages information covers 50 pages, and may have the answer to my
problem, but I have not been able to free up the time to read
through it]. The CD-ROM attached to this book is genuinely
useful, and shows care in its compilation. Under 1% of the 942
pages in this book are used to describe it -- instead a nifty
on-disk program allows you to access the information with ease.
Overall I would give this an A without hesitation -- it probably
is one of the best books of its kind, deserving a place on the
bookshelf of any W95 power user.
Of the two books, the Livingstone/Straub book is clearly the
better, but bear in mind that the two titles have somewhat
different purposes, and they supplement rather than supplanting
each other. Anyone who can spend the 3 or 4 weeks needed to get
thoroughly familiar with both these books will be able to
dominate even large cocktail parties with ease [as well as
leaping small computers in a single bound!].
Biblical Bits #21
-- Did they spell that right? --
and didst debase thyself even into hell.. Isaiah 57:9
DECISIONS DECISIONS...
By David L. Potter
ab934@chebucto.ns.ca
Over the last couple of weeks I've (suddenly) noticed that the
technology fog has cleared. This has probably been happening for
months but... the price of a 486 motherboard has finally dropped
into my' price range.
In starting to consider at the differences between 486dx
motherboards, I've realized that at the Pentium level (my next
stop on the backside of the technology curve...) there really is
only one choice...the PCI type board. The PCI type board is
available for the 486chip as well and is roughly comparable in
price with the 486 VLB (Vesa Local Bus) boards. Some retailers
are charging a little more for the PCI board.
In the world of retail there are three approaches to the PCI/VLB
question. In the 486 platform the discount retailers seem to be
selling nothing but VLB, some retailers/system builders including
members of this group sell both, and others like K-PC Lte. list
only 486 PCI systems.
There is general consensus that there is little or no performance
advantage to a PCI system in the 32 bit 486 platform... it's real
strength is in the Pentium 64 bit platform. However... if like
me you are looking at an upgrade path that included additional
ram and a new improved video card, the VLB system is a dead end.
It has been suggested to me that if I bought a 486 VLB system now
that I should expect to sell it lock stock and barrel when I
decide to move up to a Pentium.
Unfortunately this does not sit very well with my personal
approach to computer systems. I would rather buy a 486 PCI
system and a basic chunk of 72 pin ram now, increase the ram and
upgrade the video card to PCI in the spring and transfer the ram
and video card to a Pentium mb next fall.
I have absolutely no expectation of ever sticking a Pentium chip
in a 486 motherboard and I regard salespeople that suggest this
possibility as a FEATURE of the motherboard (or system) to be
practising the lowest form of the art of sales.
At the 486 level, the whole thing comes down to whether you are
intent on upgrading the system and would like to be able to
transfer memory and video into a Pentium future.... or whether
you will run it until it drops and then sell the system and buy a
Pentium. If the latter is the case you probably should probably
buy the fastest Pentium you can afford right now'. Tell your
friends! ...;-}
FORMAT
By Bill Marchant
Floppy disks these days almost always come preformatted, so the
action of formatting a whole box of disks is seldom practised.
It is useful however to have a good working knowledge of how to
format a disk. One benefit of getting all those unsolicited
disks in the mail is that they can be reformatted for other use.
Formatting can be done from the DOS prompt or from within Windows
(all my references to Windows here refer to Windows 3.1x). In
Windows, if you go to the File Manager, and select the Disk menu
item, you get a menu which contains among other things "Format
Disk".
Selecting Format Disk presents another Dialogue Box with the
options "Disk in Drive", "Capacity", "Label", "Make System Disk"
and "Quick Format". I will review each of these in turn.
Disk in drive is easy. You mouse click the down arrow at the
right of the edit box and select the appropriate drive. Most of
the time this will not be necessary, since the only floppy drive
you will have will be showing.
Capacity will usually be 1.44 Mbyte, but there are still a lot of
720 Kbyte disks in the 3 « inch size. The 1.44s have an extra
hole in the bottom right hand corner (Hold the disk so that the
hole with the slider is at the bottom left, with the label up).
The 720s do not have the extra hole. If you are still using 5
1/4 inch floppies, there is no visible way to tell the 360 Kbyte
disks from the 1.2 Mbyte disks; although most of the 1.2s will
have some notice on the box they came in. Fortunately these disk
are now becoming rare.
The Label edit box provides a space to type in the name of the
disk. Most people will ignore this, since it has little
practical value for casual disks. Just leave it blank unless you
have a reason to use it. Labels (Disk Names) can be up to eleven
characters long.
Quick Format is a way of getting things done a bit more quickly
if all you are trying to do is recycle a disk which has already
been formatted. You need to be sure that the disk has not been
damaged in any way, since the quick procedure does not do a
complete format.
Make a System Disk will do a complete format of the disk and then
copy the three essential DOS programs, COMMAND.COM, IO.SYS and
MSDOS.SYS, onto the disk so that it becomes a bootable disk. You
will want to have at least one bootable disk in your disk box so
that you can boot from the A: drive in the event that your C:
drive becomes unusable for some reason. Maybe next month the
topic of this effort should be the DISASTER DISK.
I still lean to the opinion that all this disk formatting stuff
is much easier using commands at the DOS prompt. For example to
format a 1.44 Mbyte disk in my A: drive-- "FORMAT A:". To do
a 720K disk in the A: drive -- "FORMAT A: /F:720". To do a quick
format in A: -- "FORMAT A: /Q". To make a system disk in A: --
"FORMAT A: /S. If you are reformatting a disk, DOS will check on
what kind it is, so that the size switch is not required. The
proper syntax for these commands can be found under "HELP FORMAT"
at the DOS prompt.
If you are in Windows, and you wish to use DOS, select the MS DOS
icon from the Main group, Do the appropriate command, and when
you are finished enter "EXIT" to return to windows.
WHAT ARE THOSE BEEPS FOR?
By Colin Stuart
This article is more on a subject that I started a few months ago
on interesting computer problems that I have encountered at work.
I can run out of really interesting stories at times and have to
depend on other's misfortunes to provide me with some material.
This month I have two new short items that I will attempt to
relate here.
The first tale relates to the hard disk demonstration that I will
be presenting this month. A person (who shall go unidentified)
was working on upgrading a computer. This entailed upgrading the
RAM from 4 to 8 megs and exchanging the hard drive for a larger
one. Now this person is not the most experienced computer type
person and I expected that there could be a few questions. I
gave him an older hard drive that had been collected from another
computer being upgraded and some 1 meg simms.
I checked on the progress a couple of times over the next hour or
so and all was going fairly well. The data was copied off the
hard drive onto the server (network are great for this) and he
had managed to get the computer opened up. He's a bit slow at
this but I have hopes that he might improve with a bit of
experience. I told him to remove the old drive, put the new one
in and install the RAM. The RAM was going to take a while as you
had to remove the power supply to get at the simm slots in this
particular machine. I went off to do some other work thinking
that he would ask if there were any problems.
Next thing was he running around the corner saying "There's smoke
coming out of the new hard drive!" As we proceeded to check this
out I had a number of thoughts running through my mind such as
"Not another computer on fire. This is fairly straight forward -
how can smoke come out of a hard drive?" Well I found out how.
The air had that burned electrical smell. I hate that - it
always means that something isn't going to work again. A
question or two and a quick exam revealed the problem. The power
connector for the hard drive had been plugged in the wrong way.
This is very hard to do as the connector is keyed so it can only
go in the right way. Well he said it didn't seem to fit the
other way so he pushed it in this way. I asked him if he had
looked at the shape of the connectors, and I got back "ah - no -
I didn't really look closely".
As by way of explanation for those of you who may not be aware,
most things in the computer use either 5 or 12 volts. Hard
drives use both, basically 5 volts for the components on the
controller board and 12 volts for the motor that spins the
platters around. If you switch the connector around you give the
motor 5 volts which really won't hurt it but the circuit board
doesn't like 12 volts at all. It was deader than a doornail.
I disconnected the drive and looked to see if anything else
looked damaged. I turned on the computer and nothing happened.
Whipped the multi I/O card out and replaced both it and the IDE
cable. Computer came up okay. Luckily I also had another older
hard drive around and was able to use that in place of the dead
one. Told him it was lucky that it wasn't a brand new drive that
had been damaged.
On to the next tale of woe. Another fellow (again not named) was
working on a few older computers that were going to be put back
into use. What happened next provided me with the title of this
article.
He had just started working away on this computer when he came
running around the corner to the my desk, pulled open the desk
drawer and grabbed the first set of keys he could find. His
comment was "I need a hard disk lock key". I was slightly
puzzled by this comment but let it go. He was back a moment
later and said that those keys didn't fit. That was when I asked
him what a hard disk lock was. He really meant a case lock,
which depending on the computer, may just lock the case, the
keyboard, or do nothing at all.
He said then "The keyboard is not working, it won't do anything
but beep at me". I asked him if he knew what POST error codes
were. Not really, but he had heard of them. I walked over and
he demonstrated what happened when he turned the computer on. By
the way he already had the case off the top of the computer so I
really wondered about this key thing.
The machine beeped three times and then kept repeating the three
beeps. He said it changes if I push in the turbo switch, which
resulted in three beeps of a slightly different pitch. I looked
inside the case and noticed that something didn't look quite
right. "You know" I said, "there is no RAM inside this
computer". I guess that must have been the problem. I looked up
the error code afterwards - 3 beeps means that there was a base
64K RAM failure. I suppose not being able to find a base 64K of
RAM would classify as a failure to the BIOS.
What can be learned from these two incidents? I would say that
it is to Look Closely. Both of these problems could have been
either prevented or diagnosed by simply observing what was being
worked on and having a basic familiarity with the hardware. They
were good for a laugh or two as well. Next month I will probably
talk about the latest upgrade to my computer.
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, but if you are sending a file attachment to your
message, it should be UUencoded and not a mime attachment.
Newsletter Production Notes
For those who may be interested, the newsletter was formatted
this month with WordPerfect for Windows 6.1 running on a Pentium
120 with 16 megs of RAM.
Much of the clipart used is from Novell (formerly WordPerfect)
Presentations 3.0 which comes as part of the Perfect Office
Suite. The only problem is that there isn't a printed list of
the images so you have to root' around a bit.
The original was printed at 600 dots per inch resolution on a HP
Laserjet 4M. 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 were about 75 copies produced this month of which around 70
were mailed out. Any extra copies from the previous few month's
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
The dates for this year's meetings are listed below.
26 November
7 January (due to Christmas)
28 January
25 February
24 March
28 April
26 May
23 June
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.
