The Planning Committee surprised the heck of me when they unanimously agreed to attempt to return to the Elks if we are able to do so. I said unanimously, except for me as I thought the ambiance was better and the facilities superior [at Unity Church]. They want to go back. I will see what I can do.
Further, we have had three speakers not able to present as well as they might because our projector does not natively show 1024 x 768 but merely 800 x 600 natively with poor scaling to the higher resolution. Thus the Planning Committee authorized replacement if the non-native lower resolution is acceptable. Demonstrations of this critical capability are being arranged.
Last month there was a discussion of how to get Virtual Personal Network (VPN) to allow operation of a remote computer through a tunnel. I have to tell you that the Microsoft solution is not worth the effort, especially in view of their absence of available support, but that the Symantec PCAnywhere solution is much simpler, just as secure, and a lot easier to install. There is a long story here but I'll reserve it for persons interested in this capability on a one-to-one basis.
MailWasher has done an excellent job of getting rid of 95% of my SPAM. The first iteration was use of the downloaded version without changes, it told all of the sites that were listening that my account was closed. That was effective as the spammers do not want to send to closed accounts. Then there are the hard-core spammers that do not check for returns and don't care if your account is closed.
So I went to the next step and used SpamCop assiduously for several months and believe that I had some impact on the spammers by adding them to the national SpamCop list. This took some time and the results were hard to evaluate.
So then I decided that I would pay $30 to SpamCop for a "pro" account so that the e-mail would be automatically strained though the filters that I was supporting but not using. In my researches on how to accomplish this action, I found out that MailWasher, in conjunction with SpamCop, had a provision for me to download the SpamCop filter mechanism and put it into MailWasher. So I spent a while doing this only to discover at the end that all I had to do was go to MailWasher/Tasks/Options/General and merely check off "Check the origin of the e-mail…". So simple. I suggest you try it. Life certainly should get better concerning SPAM.
At the Saturday Clinic a brand new XP machine came in that had no history at all and the object was to transfer only the Outlook Express and the My Documents files from a Win98 computer. Sounds easy but networking Win98 to XP is really a pain. So PCRelocator was employed on the 3 GB of data via the parallel port. It took all night. Suffice it to say that I will be purchasing two USB 2.0 cards which can be placed into each computer to cut out the overnight transfer. What to transfer is supposed to be accomplished by a built-in wizard in XP. That testing will come next or you are asked to feedback to me what you have found out about the Microsoft wizard.
In the last week and half I have had two separate persons who are organized people, throw away the activation codes of their software. They now have a CD and no codes because they are removing the CD from the envelope and putting the CD into some sort of case or stack and throwing away the old envelope or some other piece of paper that has the code. The result is that the CD is worthless. My very strong suggestion is that you keep software in its original box along with all of the inserts to assure usefulness of the product. Reserve two feet on a shelf in the garage if necessary.
Before you buy an inkjet printer, investigate whether you want to refill your own cartridges or bow to the manufacturers and buy their over-priced cartridges. There are two methods used by many manufacturers to control your filling your own: fuse and counting. The first is when the cartridge gets empty, a fuse is blown on the cartridge. You can buy replacements where the fuse has been restored by a second party. The second way is that the printer will count the number of characters that it has thrown and when the printer calculates that the cartridge is empty, the printer will not print any further - whether the cartridge was empty or not and it usually is not. Sometimes you can find out how to reset the counter on the net.
Larry Magid gave a talk on Technology and the War. Larry contributes computer and health articles to the Palo Alto Daily every week. You can visit Larry's web page at www.pcanswer.com.
Here's a link to the LA Times page showing the original and altered photos Larry told us about at the meeting
At our March 12 general meeting, someone asked about finding some train sounds to add to a silent video program of trains. One search engine that offers search for Audio files is “alltheweb” www.alltheweb.com . Their search tabs are: Web, News, Pictures, Video, Audio, and FTP.
Recently I have been having trouble installing Norton Anti-Virus Version 2003 on a Windows 98 machine for one of my client's that I am working on right now. The problem first started out as a problem with email not being received and this turned out to be a problem on ATT Broadband's side rather then on the machine itself. While working on the machine, I saw that it had a 3 to 4 year old McAfee Anti-Virus software that was out of date. I recommended to the client, that she needed a new program, so I got her Norton Anti-Virus 2003 software, but later discovered that the software refused to run, so I ran a scan using Symantec's On-line scanner and it found the Klez virus. I downloaded and used the Klez removal tool to remove the virus to no avail. It didn't find it, but the Norton Software still refuses to run and also tried editing the Windows Registry, but didn't find anything wrong according to Symantec's on-line support. However I did download McAfee's latest Anti-Virus Evaluation software and it ran fine without any of those problems I mentioned above. I never have experienced any of these problems before. Since the machine is a DELL and came with McAfee software to begin with, I have a hunch the bundled software is somehow tied in with the Windows 98 that came with the machine, so a user can't use other software than what came with machine and must be updated with the same like software. This is my impression, since I have switched from McAfee to Norton on my machines and never had this problem.
I have many gripes about Symantec, as well as other manufacturers as well. Having to pay for phone tech support can be expensive if used a lot, as well as forced upgrades of software that a person may not need. Seems like this is the wave of the future for all software. Symantec's On-line tech support is excellent, but one can't use their email for these kinds of problems and needs to use Phone or On-line Support. Many of these companies use consumers as guinea pigs, rather than iron out bugs in the first place. I thought that is what beta testers are for. Software shouldn't make a mess out of people's machines and make it hard for them to use their tech support, expensive that is. I am considering switching to some other Anti-Virus software in the future and also try to support smaller companies like maybe Panda and other software like Open Office or Corel. If you have any question about this article, please email me . This might be a worthy subject to talk about in future club meetings.