This month has been a bear from the technological sense. The ISP that was serving me (and 3000 others) bellied up, leaving a trail of problems. While many of the accounts were able to transfer to AT&T, my particular attempt failed and there was no support available. So if you sent me something mid-January, and I didn't respond, it is because the messages got thrown into the trash by the vendor.
Recently I had to deal with a Win95 machine that saved space by using a compression scheme installed by the manufacturer. As a result, the sum total of the operating system was a single file that was 1 GB big, and which needed to be dealt with many, many cycles for the simplest operation. Of course, there was no backup. The upshot was that the debugging and working with the system was virtually impossible. The compression scheme was set into place when a disk of 3 GB was considered large. It took about an hour to network it to one of my machines and each time I tried to deal with a potential virus, I had to wait 30 minutes for the file to be uncompressed, read, and recompressed.
I finally copied the file onto a tape (2 hours) and got rid of the problem. I advise that you not attempt to play hero to people that have obsolete stuff and have such similar situations.
During the above condition, I had to fend off the virus that Hank Skawinski has warned us all about. Turns out that I initially did not recognize it as a virus and so had ignored it. I was lucky that I use Eudora which (along with Navigator) is immune to this problem. Another reason to not go along with the crowd.
Anyhow, I have to, regretfully, admit that the Internet is just a toy to a bunch of turkeys (put in your own word) that don't know any better - that need their butts kicked. I have to add to my soapbox tirade about backups, the soapbox tirade of virus protection. Ya just gotta do it whether you like it or not.
So the question comes down to the decision of what virus protection to get and I have to say that it is the Symantec Anti-Virus that you should obtain. I prefer purchasing a boxed version, as the download version is a problem if you need to substitute machines for any reason.
Further, the updating of the Symantec product is much better implemented and much less of a hassle than the McAfee product. Worse, the McAfee product has had their key principals leave, and is now produced by a new, financially-oriented team of people that are merely going to run the product into the ground. It is too bad, but that is the way it is.
There are other players in the anti virus field, but I have never heard of any of them having much more than a "me too" capability. I am far from a Symantec endorser, but this is one area that they seem to do OK. The anti-virus that I bought came bundled with Norton Utilities 2001 which includes the System Checker. While it seems to handle minor anomalies, I have never had it really fix anything critical.
The SpeedDisk that comes in the same package uses a different sort method and philosophy than the Microsoft defragger. I credit Hank Skawinski wherein he uses the Microsoft software wherever possible, and that includes the use of the Microsoft defragger rather than the Symantec one.
Another minor point is that it is important to run the Microsoft ScanDisk FIRST and then the defragger because, if there are problems, you want to have a program designed to fix structural problems to be in effect when the problem is found.
And for those of you who are ignoring the fact that you don't have a total backup, I still propose tapes because once you start a tape, no further intervention is necessary. I have been buying the HP 4/8GB drive for under $200 at: DynaDirect, 877-438-3962 P/N HEWC4387B. Order at least three cartridges while you are at it. 8GB is not an especially big drive, but is usually more than sufficient for Win98 and a bunch of additional utilities. I'll be asking to see how many are on order at the next meeting.
The cost per person for the Su Hong dinner will be $17.00 for dinner B.
Regards,
Jim
Attendees: Jim Dinkey, Nat Landes, Bev Altman, John Buck, John Sleeman, Robert Mitchell, Mildred Kohn, Kendric Smith, Stan Hutchings.
Jim Dinkey announced some up-coming meeting speakers: Gilman Louie in August, Jan Altman in May. We still need a March speaker - suggestions included PayPal, Palm Computer, Microsoft, Intuit.
There was a discussion of Newsletter editing policy.
Our Treasurer, Nat Landes, is still trying to get signature authority. He is working with Jim Dinkey. Bev Altman turned over $658 from the last two months, a lot of that was CD sales.
A package of CorelDraw 8 was turned in to Bev. It will be auctioned at an up-coming meeting.
It would be good to demonstrate some of the Club CD contents, to give members a better idea of what is available, and perhaps how to use the programs. We are asking for volunteers to take a program and develop a short presentation. It was suggested the CD's be displayed prominently at the sign-in table, with price conspicuously posted so guests don't mistake it for a "freebie". Jim Dinkey will try to get some jewel boxes for the CDs from Jim Bailey.
Robert Mitchell will be given a $200 advance to cover publishing the Newsletter.
Our scheduled speaker didn't show up, so Richard "Dick" Kratt, Secretary of the Palo Alto Elks Lodge (www.paloaltoelks.org) gave an interesting talk about his system that allows him to function as secretary despite being paralyzed. Dick had come to the meeting to hear the scheduled speaker, who in 1994 started helping Dick get hardware and software to overcome his handicaps.
Dick's system consists of: an electric wheelchair, maintained by the VA, which cost more than $15,000; computer system; Dragon Naturally Speaking Pro to convert his words to text; a Shure microphone; a cell phone (with special connection for disabled persons); a Medenta tracker, to track head movements and convert to mouse movements; a "sip-puff" controller; a 9-button input device controlled by tongue; an X-10 controller, which controls many things around his home; and other hardware and software acquired and adapted over the years since being paralyzed by a fall in 1992.
Jaime Alvarez talked briefly about his company Tiqit Computers. It is a spin-off of the Stanford Wearable Computer Lab, specializing in miniaturizing the PC technology. The Matchbox PC, at only 5 cubic inches (84 cc) and 3.3 oz (93 g), is the world's smallest full-function x86 PC. Tiqit Computers (www.tiqit.com/corporate.html) was started in March of 2000 by Stanford professor Vaughan Pratt and his Ph.D. student Greg Defouw to bring the Matchbox PC to market and to develop follow-on mobile and wearable technology. Their current location is at 111B Independence Drive in Menlo Park. Niche markets for the Matchbox PC include embedded automation systems, aerospace, wearable computers, remote datalogging, etc. where the advantages of small size, light weight, low power, reliability, and silent operation are a necessity.
The Kournikova virus is a VBS-based (Visual Basic Scripts) worm bug, and while the spread of this virus has tapered off, another VBS pest could appear at any time.
Fortunately, there's an easy way to halt VBS bugs from running their malicious scripts.
Making this change will cause the VBS file to harmlessly open in Notepad, rather than execute the script and activate the virus.
Windows XP
Price: Still in Beta
To be Released later this year
I recently have been reading about a new version of Windows that will bring the reliability of Windows 2000 to the rest of us. Long over due. It will have a new interface that is supposed to be easier to use than the current version and sport the NT Kernel used in 2000. This version was called Whistler, but the official name is Windows XP. It is still going through beta versions right now. The consumer version will be compatible with the devices that consumers use. I saw pictures of the interface and it is different than what we are used to in Windows 98. At this point, I don't know what the minimum and recommended specifications are yet, since I can't find any information on that yet.
According to what I read about the features, it seems like a pretty promising product from Microsoft that is long overdue, by a couple of years. There is one thing that concerns me about this new product. It has to do with the new installation procedure used. During the installation of Windows XP, it will tie the installation with the configuration of the machine and require that you register the product before Windows will boot up completely. Tying the installation of Windows with the hardware configuration could cause problems with adding or subtracting other hardware to or from the machine. Since Windows is more tied with hardware, simply removing the old video card and putting in a new one might cause Windows to fail to boot up. I have been reading about this on the www.techtv.com web site and others as well about this. Microsoft is attempting to stop piracy of its software, but this could make it a nightmare for those who want to add hardware such as memory or a new hard drive to the machine. I hope this isn't a repeat of the copy protection that software companies used in the 80's that users had to go through much aggravation to use their software. For those who have assembled a couple of machines to use at home, this would certainly end the use of one copy for the different machines. Even now, we are supposed to buy a copy for each machine that we have. I hope the price for this software won't be a whole lot more than the current version. As we know, most software from Microsoft is over priced For the moment, I will wait and see, what the public's reactions will be when the product is finally shipped and people try doing upgrades with their product and making hard changes on their machine. Only then will I decide if I want this product or not.