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NOTE NEW MEETING FACILITIES | |
The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of each month.
The HAPCC has a new meeting place at:
Maritime Museum of the Atlantic
1675 Lower Water Street
Halifax, NS
Meeting time 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Parking available in the nearby Government parking lot or in the
Museum parking lot. Access to the building is via the Night Entrance
Doors, located just to the right of the regular front doors.
To be let in, ring the bell on the upper left side of the Night
Entrance Doors.
The meeting room is on the second floor and has a
theater type of layout. Washrooms are located close by.
Elevator service is available.
The planning meeting location will be at:
Oct. 6th at Diane Smith
3824 Dutch Village Rd. Apt. 11
Halifax, NS B3L 4G2
across the street from AURORA internet providers and McCurdy Print.
In an other item in the press the Queen has entered cyberspace and the
link is The British Monarchy-The Official web Site. It is worth
checking out.
The Bluenose, a fishing schooner, is an icon of down east history. Find more on the story at
Bluenose II Home Port Page
The HAPCS has two kinds of meetings. There is the regular Sunday night
meeting which most members attend regularly, and there is the monthly (approximately)
Planning meeting which organizes the business of the Society, including what happens
on the Sundays. The planning meeting is held on Monday , a week after the regular
meeting in All members of the Society are urged to attend.
At the planning meetings, we discuss feature speakers for regular meetings, finances,
membership, training, and other computer related subjects.
....Bill Marchant
Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
Announcements
Minutes of special planning meeting and windows 95 opening screen.
The Newsletter, a few notes about what goes into this document
Meeting schedule for the upcoming 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.
Society Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8
Chairperson David Potter
Vice-Chair Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara
Web Librarian Thayne MacLean
Secretary/Newsletter Editor Colin Stuart
Membership Promotion Pat Conen
and the following members who assist in planning our monthly meetings:
Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Diane Smith and Ken Gilmour.
We have only a few announcements for this month's issue.
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. 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.
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 reed 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).
Bill Marchant
Vice Chairman
Halifax Area Personal Computer Club
Special Planning Meeting
25 August 1997, 7:30 PM
at 14 Hawthorn St, Dartmouth NS
Minutes from notes taken by Bill Marchant
We met at the home of David Potter. The meeting commenced at 7:30 pm.
Members in attendance:
Diane Smith, Henry Hill, Rob MacCara, Thane MacLean, David Potter, Pat Conen, Norman
DeForest, George Richards, Bill Marchant
Agenda:
1: Meeting place for coming season:
a. The reply to our letter written to the Camphill Veteran's Memorial Hospital asking for space
starting in September, stated that the main room would now cost $150.00 per night, and the
small room would cost $50.00 per night.
b. A room at the Chocolate Lake Community Center will cost $16.00 per hour, for our Sunday
night meetings. This, with tax would amount to approximately $55.00 per night.
c. After some discussion, Pat Conen was appointed a committee of one to investigate further to
find a cost free meeting place. Bill Marchant will provide him with the past history.
2: Finance:
Since Rob MacCara, (treasurer elect) has not yet met with Colin Stuart, there is nothing to
report. The general consensus seems to be that we have ample funds for our modest needs at the
present time.
3: Membership:
a. Free mugs for new members. Bill Marchant to get mugs from Andy Cornwall.
b. Free disk with selected shareware for new members.
c. Get a flea market table to use for advertising the club. Action David Potter.
d. Circulate fliers to computer retailers for distribution to customers. Action David Potter.
e. Revise the format of the general meetings to appeal to a larger number of members. See
below.
f. Compile a membership list which contains e-mail addresses, as well as other computer related
data about members. Bill Marchant to see Colin Stuart.
4: General meeting organization and Year's program:
a. Meetings to start at 7:00 pm
b. More subjects should be covered at every meeting. These should be: Operating Systems,
Applications, Hardware, Internet, Programming and Games.
c. Members volunteered to produce a series of lesson plans for each subject. Each lesson would
be designed to occupy 10 to 15 minutes, so that from four to six subjects could be included in
each meeting.
(1) Operating systems Bill Marchant
(2) Software Applications Diane Smith
(3) Hardware Rob MacCara
(4) Internet Thane MacLean
(5) Programming George Richards
(6) Games To be announced. David Potter will find someone.
d. The feature speaker at each meeting will be asked to talk for up to 30 minutes, with time for
questions following.
e. The meeting will be arranged with four to six introductory subjects, at 10 to 15 minutes each,
plus question and discussion time. This will be followed by coffee. The feature speaker will fill
the remainder of the time. The meeting should adjourn by approximately 9:30.
5: Essay contest for young people:
a. Rob MacCara reported that he could arrange judges for the contest from the computer and
academic staff of the Naval Engineering School.
b. The contest would be open to students attending an educational institution up to grade 12. An
age limit was discussed, but none was set. However, it is intended that in general persons over
the age normally expected in grade 12 should not be eligible.
c. Essays would be required to be on some computer related topic, and would be approximately
500 words in length (about 2 and 1/2 typed pages).
d. Judgement would be based on the technical merit of the essay, as well as spelling, grammar
and general composition.
e. There will be at least three prizes. The top prize will be $100.00. All students submitting an
essay will be given free membership in the Club for a year.
f. We will try to obtain the assistance of school authorities to publicize the contest. A deadline
for entries to be accepted will be established. Action Bill Marchant.
g. More information will be made available shortly. Action Bill Marchant.
6. The Computer Show:
It is noted that the Computer show is on September 10 and 11. This year the general public is
being discouraged from attending. The show seems to be designed for trade only. There was no
more discussion of this.
7. News Letter:
The deadline for the newsletter should be the weekend of the 13 September. This is earlier
than normal. But is considered desirable in view of the uncertainty of our meeting place, and other
issues which might require a longer lead time.
The meeting adjourned at approximately 9:30 pm.
If you experiment with colours and type faces etc on your windows screens, you can sometimes
get so far along with experimenting that you forget how you got there. And what is worse, you
cannot find your way back to the original.
This is a subject which has been covered before in the newsletter, and at meetings, but some
things are worth repeating from time to time, and I think this is one of them. In Windows 95, the
thing that controls almost all the detail of how your computer behaves is called the Windows
registry.
When changes are made; say you change the type size on your screen, the information is stored in
the registry, so that the next time you boot up, you will get the new look you desire. To restore the
Registry to a previous condition, you need a copy of it.
Here is what you do. There are two files called SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT. You must start
your computer in the SAFE mode. You do this by pressing the F8 key when you see the message
"Starting Windows 95" on your screen. When you see the menu, select "Safe Mode Command
Prompt Only". The purpose of going into safe mode is to prevent the Registry from being loaded
while you mess with it. What you will do is make another sub-directory (DOS calls them
directories; windows calls them folders; the two words are interchangeable here) on your hard
drive, and copy the two .DAT files into it.
In SAFE mode you will probably see the C:\> prompt. If your prompt is a different letter, pretend
that these commands all refer to your letter. In this article, I will be telling you to use DOS
commands. Since spaces in DOS commands are important, and since spaces do not always show
up properly in word processor texts, I will use a tilde (~) in these commands to indicate a space.
Do not type the tilde, type the space bar. Of course you already know not to type the quotation
marks.
You must change into the \Windows sub-directory by using the DOS command "CD\Windows".
Your prompt will now look like "C:\Windows>". Make a new folder using the DOS command
"MD~REGISTRY". You can use upper or lower case for all of these commands, but the case you
chose for a registry name is used the way you type it, so if you call the thing "ReGiStRy", that is
what you will get. You can always use "md" instead of "MD". The computer will not care.
The easiest way to check that you have been successful is to use the command "cd~registry".
Your prompt should change to "C:\Windows\REGISTRY>". If it does not, stop and check what
you have done, there may be an error. If everything is still OK, change back to the \Windows
folder with the command "cd..".
Now you have to remove the hidden, system and read-only attributes of the two .DAT files. The
DOS command to achieve this is "Attrib~-h~-s~-r~SYSTEM.DAT" and "ATTRIB~-h~-s~-
r~USER.DAT". If you now use the DOS command "dir~*.DAT", you should see the two file
names. You may also have a couple of other files with the same extension. Don't worry about
them.
Now you copy the two registry files into your new REGISTRY folder. Use the following
commands. "Copy System.dat~.\Registry" and "Copy User.dat~.\Registry".
You must now restore the two original registry files to their hidden, system and read-only
condition. Use the DOS commands "Attrib~+h~+s~+r~System.dat" and "Attrib~+h~+s~+r~
User.DAT".
You are finished. Use the CTRL + ALT + DEL buttons (a la dos) to reboot your computer back
into windows.
If you need to restore your registry, you start the computer in SAFE mode again as described
above. Go to the C:\Windows> prompt as before and remove the hidden, system and read-only
attributes from the two .DAT files. Then go to the C:\Windows\REGISTRY folder and copy the
two files from C:\Windows\Registry into C:\Windows. The DOS command would be
"Copy~*.DAT~C:\Windows". If you are asked whether you want to overwrite the existing
versions of those files you select yes. When both have been copied, use the "Attrib +h +s +r
commands as above to hide them both. When you next restart windows, the condition of your
screen at the time you made the backups will be restored.
It is well to remember that whenever you make changes, like adding another application to your
system you will need to make a new backup of SYSTEM and USER.DAT. If you do not, and
later you restore these files, your new application will not be accessible.
One other thing: You may prefer to save these files on a floppy disk. In total they occupy just over
a megabyte, so a 3 1/2 inch disk is the right size. You will need to modify the above commands to
do this, but you will save about a megabyte of hard disk space.
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.
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.
MEETING SCHEDULE - 97/98
We decide on the meeting dates for upcoming year at the last
planning meeting. The dates for these are listed below.
To be listed after confirmation of dates
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.
September-28
October-26
November-23
January-4
January-25
February-22
March-22
April-26
May-17
June-28
The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8
days) after the general meeting. They are also The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, 1675 Lower Water Street,
Halifax. 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.
