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A short note on the Veterans Memorial Building, An item in the Canadian Armed Forces in house publication , the "Warrior" , The VMB will be renamed The Camp Hill Veterans' Memorial Building. The Camp Hill name is part of a tradition dating back to 1758. The rededication takes place on November 10th just before Remembrance Day November 11th. Here is a link to: Canada's Veteran's web suite where one can browse information related to Canada's fallen.
Opening Topic, Bill Marchant, - Beginner's Corner-6.30 PM
Question and Answer - Rob MacCara
Feature Topic:
" Xmas Goodies" Guest Speaker Ho-Sing Tom TNE Electronics Young Street
- Next Planning Meeting, - Users groups Thought's For the Future.......A Thank You Adventures with Memory (The Computer's!!)... ..Memory Confusion? - Do you know what kind your computer has? The Newsletter-A few notes about what goes into this document
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.
Society Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8
Executive:
Chairperson - David Potter
Vice-Chair - Bill Marchant
Secretary/Newsletter Editor - Colin Stuart
Disk Librarian - Thayne MacLean
and but not least Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Arthur Layton, Rob MacCara, Andy Cornwall, George Richards, and Diane Smith.
We have only a few announcements for this month's issue.
Last Planning Meeting
The last planning meeting was held on the 4th of November at the Veterans Memorial Building. In attendance were Bill Marchant, Diane Smith, Rob MacCara, Thayne MacLean, Norman DeForest, Henry Hill and Dr.Conen. It was a lively meeting and a number of topics were discussed for upcoming general meetings.
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.
The Delphi User's Group meets on the first Tuesday of each month. The meetings are held at the CCL Group building 2669 Dutch Village Road in Halifax, at 7:00PM. For more information call Carey Rolfe at 462-4551 or on e-mail crolfe@fox.nstn.ns.ca or Dave Hackett at 835-3894.
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 call two weeks to ten days before the next general meeting(newsletter deadline)
1 386 SX/16 or 20 Mhz, control card, cables, user manual, 5Mg RAM upgradeable to 16 needs new bios battery. $100.00 obo ...1 color cartridge for Panasonic KX-P2123 never used $40.00 Software: Resume Maker, QEMM, Screen Saver, QuatroPro, Charts 2000 $5.00 to $25.00 Contact Diane Smith...445-2021.
Welcome back to another year of Computing and I hope that you had an enjoyable Summer. I think that it is time that we start looking to the future, and try to find ways to Grow and branch out in other directions.
In order to continuing Growing it is necessary that any Organization 'Change' and 'Adapt' to Changes in it's Industry and Related Industries. And the best source of idea's for these Changes come from the individual members themselves.
The HAPCS is made up of many people with many different Abilities, Education and Interests and I think that if we take advantage of this wealth of experience and utilize it our Growth is assured.
Myself I have Two Hobbies (ie.thing's I Enjoy to Do When I have the Time).
One being Computer's and the other being Chess. I have found a way to Combine my Two 'Hobbies' into one. That is via 'The International Email Chess Group (IECG)' A group a Chess Friends playing Chess via Computer on the Internet.
Chess is not for Everyone But I think you can see what I am trying to show. We all are Different with our own way of relating to our (Passion,Addiction etc.) IF we use this great wealth of Experience, there is No Limit as to the Possibilities. Any One can attend our Monthly Planning Meetings and I am sure that Your Idea's would be Welcome. Come and let's hear your ideas. Together we can make the HAPCS even Better....Thayne
One Sunday night many years ago I thought I would like to find out about the MS DOS Society. Well I went that night and have been going ever since. As the only female in a group of males and most of which were older than I, lets say "I was the rose in a thorn bush". From the thorns I have learned a great deal and have built a confidence level where I am not afraid to open the CPU and know all the necessary parts of the machine. I have now taken my machine a 386 and upgraded it to a 486 motherboard and with a little help from a friend put it in. By myself I have taken the modem out and replaced it with a fax/modem board. I have gone into the CMOS and BIOS and located the second hard drive and made it a slave to the prime hard drive. My last step was to make the Mustek hand scanner work, and after asking a couple of questions, changed the IRQ address the scanner now is working. All there is now to do is practice. So if any girls are reading this, remember you can also do it and we the club who welcome your attendance and input. To the Thorns I say thank you for your patience and support. Maybe some night I will put together how to do a Fax Cover sheet using Procom Plus, or do FlowCharting using Microsoft Word.
Thank You ...The Rose ....'Diane'
Not long ago I decided to take advantage of the relatively low prices for memory, and add another 16 Mbytes to the memory of my relatively new computer. I called the original vendor and placed my order. The original memory was EDO memory, but when the new stuff arrived we realized that it was not EDO memory. 'Never mind'! was the cry, 'It should work anyway'.
Whether or not it ever would have worked along side the EDO memory which was in the machine, we never did find out. The fact is that when I installed the non EDO SIMMs in the two blank slots, The machine would not recognize them. The first conclusion was that the non EDO would not work with the EDO, so we ordered the right kind. And in a day or so it was in my possession.
It may be remembered that EDO memory was touted as being faster than the non EDO kind because it does not have to be refreshed as often, and consequently CPU cycles are saved by its use. The two EDO SIMMs and the two non EDO SIMMs all were marked at the 60 nanosecond speed. The computer worked fine with the original EDO memory. I put the two non EDOs in alone, and they worked fine. But the two types appeared not to like each other. While I waited for the correct new memory to arrive, I decided to check the speeds of EDO vs non EDO.
As it happened, a recent copy of Visual Development Magazine contained an article on how to check program speed using a command unique to the Pentium CPU called Read Time Stamp Counter. I used the algorithm shown in the article and wrote a short Delphi program called SPEEDMN. The program contains a loop which simply squares the value of Pi (you know 3.14159.....) a thousand times. The time stamp is read both before and after, and the difference is the number of CPU clock ticks which occurred during the operation. My Pentium runs at 100 MHz. So if the program ran for a second, I could expect the difference to be about 100,000,000. I did a lot of experimenting, and the answers appeared to be about right.
It also happens that there are two versions of Delphi; one produces code for Windows 3.1 (16 bit), and the other produces code for Windows 95 (32 bit). I produced two versions of the program and ran both of them under Windows 95 with each kind of memory.
Given the hype about EDO, one would expect a speed advantage. There was none. In fact, the 32 bit program ran slower with the EDO memory. The 16 bit program ran faster with the EDO. The differences were respectively .19% slower, and .04% faster. In other words, unless the two types of memory are being sold for the same price, ignore the EDO argument when you buy a new computer.
A dramatic difference showed up when the 32bit program was compared with the 16 bit program. Remember, both of these were run under Windows 95. The 32 bit version of SPEEDMN took only 12% of the time required by the 16 bit version. In other words, it ran 8 times as fast. The moral of this last comparison is: If you are running Windows 95, and you want the speed you have paid for, Be sure to update to the Win95 version of your application as soon as it becomes available.
Finally, this may have more to do with the two versions of Delphi than with anything else, but the 32 bit version of SPEEDMN.EXE was smaller, being 169 Kbytes as opposed to 210 Kbytes for the 16 bit version.
By the way, the two types of memory might well have got along. When I finally got four EDO SIMMs all at 60 nanoseconds, the extra memory still would not work. This resulted in the vendor taking a personal hand in the diagnosis. After some agitation with the original supplier of the mother board, an undocumented jumper was revealed, and when the change was made, the computer used all 32 Mbytes of memory.
There are several different types of system memory that can be found in your PC today, and there are advantages and disadvantages to all of them. Most of us who have done any reading in magazines or looked at computer specs recently have come across terms like FPM, EDO, or SDRAM. I hope to explain what these are and how they are implemented in your computer. Future articles will talk about cache memory and memory error correction.
Dynamic Random Access Memory or DRAM, is most easily explained as rows and columns, or a matrix of memory cells laid out in a square. Each cell can store data in bits which can be retrieved at a specific location (address) of the data. DRAM is a temporary storage bin for information that can be used to move to and from the CPU, video card and peripherals.
The most common form of common memory in use today is Fast Page Mode (FPM) DRAM. It offers an improvement over older forms of DRAM because it access the data in the same row or "page" faster. If the next bit of data is in the same row as the previous data, the memory controller does not have to repeat the row location; only the next column location.
Extended Data Out (EDO) DRAM has been gaining popularity in both system memory and video card memory as of late. EDO is similar to FPM with the difference being EDO can access back-to-back memory retrievals much faster. In a straight speed test , EDO is about 30% faster than FPM, but in actual performance gains it is closer to 15%. EDO has gained quick and wide acceptance due to its easy implementation. EDO comes in a 72 pin package and for Pentium class computers modules are installed in pairs. Price wise EDO is within a few dollars of FPM.
A recent newcomer to computer memory banks is Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM). It was developed after EDO and is quite different in that it can synchronize itself with the system CPU clock, and therefore eliminate timing delays and wait states. This makes the memory retrieval process much faster and more efficient - SDRAM is about 50% faster than EDO, with actual performance gains of about 25%.
Computers have to be designed to take advantage of new memory types. EDO is commonly supported today, with SDRAM just becoming available now. Unfortunately, most new systems do not support EDO and SDRAM installed together. SDRAM is a 168 pin wide module and can be installed singly in Pentium class computers. It is also much more expensive than FPM or EDO memory.
Hopefully I've explained enough about the different types of main memory to either identify the kind you have, or to help you make an informed decision for your next computer.
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.
We decide on the meeting dates for upcoming year at the last planning meeting. The dates for these are listed below.
24 November
5 January (none in December due to Christmas)
26 January
23 February
23 March
27 April
25 May
22 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 Veterans Memorial Building. 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.
November 10th 1996
