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Meets 4th Sunday of each month, 7:00 pm Note Change of Location Veteran's Memorial Hospital, Room 1613A Corner of Robie and Jubilee Road, Halifax, N.S.
24 March Meeting
Opening Topics
- Windows Feature
- Question and Answer
Feature Event
- What's New In Printers - Guest - Ken-Porter from K-PC Lte
In This Month's Issue: Announcements Communication Between User Groups Some info on other groups found on the Internet More Notes on DOS in Win95 The DOS Utilities in Windows95 The Upgrade Corner The first article in an ongoing series on upgrading computers The Newsletter A few notes about what goes into this document Meeting Schedule 95/96 Meeting dates for the remainder of the year.
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.
I have a few more items in this section this month than in the last issue.
Last Planning Meeting The last planning meeting was held on Monday, 4 March at the Veterans Hospital. After the usual discussions, we finally decided on our next meeting topic. The next general meeting will feature our friend from K-PC Lt e, Ken-Porter who will provide with his views on what's new in printers. We haven't discussed this topic for a while and there have been a few new products that have appeared in the recent past.
We've Moved!
Commencing in January 1996 the regular monthly
meetings of the Society will be held in Room 1613A of the Veteran's
Memorial Hospital (VMH) at the corner of Robie Street and Jubilee
Road, Halifax. The planning meetings will be held in a different
room in the same building. These facilities are provided at no
cost to the Society. 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 comessionaire 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.
Society Address Change
Please note the new mailing address for the Society: P.O. Box
185, Stn. Main Dartmouth, N.S. B2Y 3Y3 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
This group meets
sometimes on the second Wednesday of the month at Purdy's Wharf
Tower Two. For information contact Donovan Long at 422 1975 or
by e-mail at tsst@isisnet.com.
Stolen Computer
Norman DeForest's
neighbours, R. K. Carrick Surveying Limited, had their business
broken into on February 27, 1996 and he has asked that we let
people know about it. The following items were stolen: [1] True
North 486DX50 computer with 8 meg. RAM, 256K cache, 2400 baud
internal modem, 850 meg. HD (new), 230 watt power supply (new).
Serial # 00100814. [2] DAEWOO monitor 15" OSD 0.28 dp, Mod.
# CMC-1502B, Serial # 5082200194. [3] Hewlett Packard Model HP
600 Ink Jet Printer, Serial # SG56K181W1. [4] Logitech Mouseman
Mouse. While it is a slim chance that one of the HAPCS members
would encounter one of these, even a slim chance is better than
nothing. If you run across a "bargain" computer or accessory
that meets the above description, could you please notify: [1]
the police and [2] R. K. Carrick Surveying Limited, 5685 Cunard
Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3K 1C7 Phone: (902) 455-6001 Fax:
(902) 423-1607
For Sale:
Modem 14400 complete with documents and
Telix shareware. Asking $50. Make me an offer. Bill Marchant 477
2069 or ab884@ccn.cs.da.ca
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).
The week several new newsgroups for computer user groups appeared on the isis server. I've subscribed to them and have included in this item, some information from the messages posted to these groups. I was most interested in the idea of a New Users SIG on the same night as the main meeting. dlp comp.org.user-groups.management ...no information...(yet) comp.org.user-groups.apcug Greetings from ACGNJ (Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey) founded in April 1975. We have about 1,000 members, publish a monthly newsletter and put on the Trenton Computer Festival (cooperatively with several other clubs from NY and PA). We have a huge outdoor computer flea market, over 100 talks and forums, and lots of indoor commercial exhibitors. Check out our home page for the festival http://www.dorsai.org/fair. The club also has a home page for you to check out. comp.org.user-groups.meetings BCUG, a general interest PC club, Lincroft, NJ on the 3rd Friday of the month at 7:30. The New Users SIG meets the same night. Our March 1996 meeting will feature a presentation of Excel 95 by a rep from Microsoft. We also have 9 special interest groups (SIGS) that meet separately throughout the month. We have about 300 members. General meetings average about 100. SIG meetings average about 25 - 35 depending on which SIG. www.bcug.com/ comp.org.user-groups.newsletters The purpose of this Newsgroup is for user group officers and editors to discuss and share information regarding the production, distribution, philosophies, advertising, etc concerning computer user group newsletters. ------------------ Information about The Northeast Ohio PC Club (NEOPC) is posted on our homepage which lists the date and time of meetings, for the NEOPC and all of the Special Interest Groups. Information about free E-mail classes plus our monthly NewsMagazine. We also have all kinds of other interesting areas. http://www.en.com/users/dsieg comp.org.user-groups.misc ... no info/interesting posts. Mailing Lists The Internet SIG's LISTSERV email mailing list is hosted by America Online. This allows self-service registration and subscription maintenance. To subscribe to SIG mailings, send email to: LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM containing the line SUBSCRIBE NETSIG-L <FIRSTNAME> <LASTNAME> Note:.everything from subscribe to lastname should be on one line depending on the column layout and the font size, internet addresses may get broken in strange places... have a good look at the address to make sure you get it right... _good_luck
Make up your mind-- I will execute.. Ezekiel 5:8 I will not execute.. Hosea 11:9 -- The answer -- They executed... 2 Chronicles 24:24
by Bill Marchant
Those of you who have updated
to Windows 95 from version 3.1 will have some remnants of version
3.1 left on your hard drives. Many of these left over utilities
can be useful in WIN95. Those who bought new computers recently
with WIN95 installed will suffer the agony of not having some
of the utilities you have learned to rely on. Of course, Microsoft
would like us all to simply use Windows, and forget about convenience
and speed, but computing is like gardening in one sense. Sometimes
you have to pull the weeds by hand. UNDELETE: Examples of missing
utilities are the Virus Checker, the Undelete and the DOS Backup.
The lack of Virus checker and DOS Backup will cause little grief
since better ones were always available from third parties such
as Norton, but the need for Undelete might leave you frustrated.
"Aha!" you may say - "Windows 95 has the garbage
ca.... uh Recycle Bin, so I don't have to worry about accidental
deletes." This is true as long as you use Windows to do the
deletes, but if you use the DOS delete function at a DOS prompt,
you will not find the file in the recycle bin. The recycle bin
will not be used for floppy disk deletes or for any deletes done
over a network either. If you have UNDELETE.EXE from DOS 6.x,
you can put it in your \WINDOWS\COMMAND folder, where you may
find it useful from time to time. Of course, its use is subject
to the usual conditions, namely that the file you are trying to
undelete has not been overwritten on the disk since its deletion.
EDITOR: WINDOWS95 has a new DOS EDITOR. It can be found in the
\WINDOWS\COMMAND folder. It is called EDIT.COM. It is powerful,
yet easy to use. It can actually load nine files at the same time,
and display any two of them together on a split screen. Very handy
for modifying batch files or documents. It is of course an ASCII
text editor, and not a word processor, so it has its limitations.
I suggest you make a shortcut for it to your Desktop, and try
it out. HELP: The HELP feature of DOS 6.x is not a part of WIN95.
You still have the local help for each DOS command such as "sort
/?'' for getting help on the SORT command, but the comprehensive
HELP feature is gone. If you have access to DOS 6.x, and wish
to add HELP, you need to copy HELP.COM, HELP.HLP and believe it
or not, QBASIC.EXE. Microsoft has gone out of its way to make
this one awkward. DIRCMD and DOSKEY If you are used to DIRCMD
and DOSKEY when you are in DOS windows, you will be pleased to
know that they are available in WIN95. To use them, put the following
two lines in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file: "SET DIRCMD=/o/p"
and "DOSKEY". The first one will cause the DIR command
to pause after each screen full, and present the directories and
files in alphabetical order. The second one will give you all
the usual DOSKEY features. Type DOSKEY /? at the DOS prompt for
a resume of these features. FINALLY for now: You can set a DOS
window to full screen by selecting the button which has the arrows
pointing in four directions. After you have done that, you may
not remember how to get back to the Window again. Don't forget
ALT + Enter will switch between full screen and Window.
Most of the Society members have a computer of one sort or another. Some of us have newer Pentium machines while others are still working away with older 286 or 8086/88 devices. No matter what type of computer people are using, nearly everyone is looking at improving their computer in one way or another. So I thought that I might start a column that would appear in each month's newsletter dealing with the subject of upgrading or adding on to your computer. The articles don't have to be written by me, anyone with some ideas can submit an article on the subject, whether long or short. So what have I got about upgrading for this month. My home computer (and the one at work) is not a particular brand such as Compaq or Packard Bell. Both are piles of parts that I have assembled. The one at home has been slowly improved over the past few years. It is currently a mid to large tower with a Pentium 120mhz PCI/ISA motherboard. It has a 540 meg IDE hard drive and 16 megs of RAM. There is also a CD-ROM kit, bus mouse and both a 1.44 and 1.2 floppy drives. One thing I like about the tower is the expandability. I have one external 3.5 bay and four 5.25 bays. Inside there are spots for four 3.5 hard drives. Awesome dudes. There is also an additional fan in the front of the case to help keep things cool. I am still using my original IBM XT keyboard with this, not the first model but the later one with the 101 key layout. Many people have a fondness for a particular keyboard. I like the feel of my IBM keyboard. Some of the cheap ones you can get just don't cut it, both in terms of feel and in durability. This may be a topic which I (or someone else) can get into in a later edition. So on to my latest update/upgrade. There are actually two. One was a new video card and the other a new modem. First of all the modem. I was using a Hayes 2400 for many years. This was fine for most things that I did but once I got onto the Internet it really showed its limitations. Netscape just doesn't cut it at 2400 baud. I could go and get a cup of coffee while the home page was coming down. Need to go faster. So I went out and got a US Robotics 28.8 fax/modem. Big difference naturally. The Internet is now useable from home. Cool. I can spend more time in front of the computer. I got an external modem by the way. I like to look at the flashing lights and the other thing is that if I have to reset it, I can just power it on and off without having to power down my whole computer. Internal ones save on desk space, serial cables, and the additional electrical connection that an external one needs. So the modem bit was relatively easy. The other upgrade was a new video card. I have planned to do this for a while. There are many people that just look at CPU speed as the only important factor in computer speed. If you are using Windows then there are a number of other items that need to be looked at. The first thing is RAM. Windows, in fact any graphical multi-tasking (or semi-multitasking) operating system needs piles of RAM. Four megs just doesn't cut it these days. Eight is the minimum and if I was buying a new computer I would go with 16 megs from day one. The next thing that can have a drastic affect on the speed of Windows is disk space. If you have very little then Windows can slow to a crawl even if you have 8 megs of RAM. A fast hard disk, permanent swap file and room for temp files make a big difference. The next thing is the video card. I have been using a Trident 8900 ISA card with one meg of RAM. While this worked fine in the 386SX I used to use here, it really doesn't match the Pentium. Obviously the thing to get is a PCI video card, maybe with more RAM for the neat-o multi-media images on the CD-ROMs. There are a large number of video cards out there on the market. Some are fairly common while others are somewhat more exotic. The price can vary quite a bit, from just over $100 to more than $700. What is the difference? One thing is RAM. More video RAM costs more money. The other differences are not immediately obvious. I don't know a lot about these but one thing that better cards do is to speed up graphics. Some are Windows accelerators. Others specialize in other graphical environments such as CAD. I have run some benchmarks on an older 16 bit VGA card (Oak) and a newer ATI mach64 PCI card. In the same computer the ATI card is faster at every video operation and up to 10 times faster at some operations. So I got an ATI Graphics Expression card one day last week. This makes a serious difference in the speed of my Windows apps. It has 2 megs of RAM and lets me run Windows in 800 x 600 with 32 thousand colours. An idea of the speed of this is when I win playing solitaire, all 52 cards pop off the deck and finish bouncing across the screen in about 8 seconds. Can't really make many of them out too well at that speed. Screens and dialog boxes just seem to pop up out of nowhere. So what did these upgrades cost? Both were about the same price - lets say $350 after tax each. To me they were well worth the money. So that is all for this month. I have a few more items to talk about for next month.
Biblical Bits #27 -- On the right of the screen? -- and he said, open the window eastward 2 Kings 13:17
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 50 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.
The dates for this year's meetings are listed below:
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 the Veteran's Hospital. 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.
