The PC Improvement News
Issue 1-32
May 19, 1999

ISSN 1488-3163
Published electronically by PC Improvements (c) 1999
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Welcome to the 32nd edition of the PC Improvement News. In this newsletter,
I have a couple of tips to make your computing life easier as well as
highlights of the past weeks PC Industry News. I am more than willing to
discuss any PC related topics in this newsletter. Just email me at
editor@pcin.net with your suggestions. I would also appreciate it
if you let me know if there is any strange formatting in the newsletter so
that I can fix them.

Give me two or three issues, and I know that you will get something great
out of this!


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SOME OPENING THOUGHTS
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None


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THOUGHT OF THE WEEK
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"The book you don't read won't help."
          - Jim Rohn

Thought courtesy of http://www.HappyPublishing.com/

To subscribe to the FREE "Aspire to Something Higher" Thought-Of The Day,
send a blank email to HappyQuotes-subscribe@listbot.com


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THE NEWS
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No Regulation of the Internet in Canada
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After about 10 months of meetings, the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has decided that no regulation of the
Internet is needed. They said that Canada is well represented on the
Internet and the healthy competition on these sites allows for them to be
successful. This is one of the first announcements from a country on
Internet regulation.

For more info:
http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,36636,00.html


Internet Filtering
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In a similar story, the US Senate voted unanimously to "encourage" ISPs to
offer a filtering service. The filtering services are supposed to filter
out objectionable words. Senator Orrin Hatch said that the amendment "is
largely aimed at limiting the negative impact violence and indecent
material on the Internet have on children." This is a great step, but I'm
not sure how binding the "encouragement" will be.

For more info:
http://www.cnnfn.com/digitaljam/newsbytes/130610.html


Web Site Names UK Spies
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In a story that sounds like it is out of the next James Bond movie, a web
site posted the names of some of Britain's top spies. This raised
questions of who posted the names and were the spies' lives in jeopardy.
The site was located in the US, so this also raised the question of does
the UK government has the authority to shut down a web site in another
country. As it turned out, the web site was shut down. I don't know much
more about the site, as the URL wasn't published (obviously). I don't know
if this was a personal site or the site of some radical activist group.

For more info:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/990512-000022.html


Cyber Trial of the Century
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The judge presiding over this case has suggested to the participants that
they should just let the computer makers decide what software on their
computers. It is such a simple solution, but I guess lawyers aren't
allowed to come up with answers that are simple like that. This doesn't
mean it will happen, but it seemed to say that the Judge was kind of
agreeing with the DOJ, but that does not want to severely reprimand
Microsoft.

For information on the Microsoft vs DOJ trial, visit:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/special/msdojtrial.html


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I NEED HELP
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As many of you know, I offer a free help service via email. If you have a
question, you can email me and I will try my best to answer them. I can
answer about half of them. Those are things that I do regularly or have
experience with. There are other things that I have never tired or
experienced so I don't have an answer. I hope to post those questions here
and see if any of the readers have any suggestions. I will include all
reasonable suggestions with credit to you. I will not check the validity of
these comments. That is up to you.

Previous Questions
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None (This is the first week).


New Questions
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Q1) I know that Windows has startup and shutdown screens that are bitmap
images. Does anyone know of a way to just input text and have it converted
into one of those bitmaps so that it will appear in one of the
startup/shutdown screens?

Q2) I want to download movies but it will not let me. I tried save target
as and it worked for awhile but now it stops down loading about 1 to 5
minutes after it starts. HELP. It happens on every site.

If you have any answers to these questions, please email me at
mailto:freehelp@pcimprovements.com


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THE TIPS and OTHER STUFF
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What to do when your hard drive crashes
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This is a question that a lot of people have. Sometimes your hard drive
can still work, but it appears that you have lost everything. Up until
recently, the only solution was to send your hard drive to a data recovery
shop and pay hundreds of dollars for them to try to fix it. Well, thanks
to PowerQuest at http://www.powerquest.com/ we now have a much more
affordable solution. They have a product called Lost and Found that for
about $40 will help you retrieve your data. I recently had a nice email
from Justin Peer who had a problem with his hard drive and had purchase
Lost and Found.

"It is absolutely amazing. After everything else (Norton Utilities etc)
failed to be able to even read the disk, this software trundled through
and recovered every file I had lost. I was stunned.

Nobody had even mentioned this software from the 24-hour support
newsgroup, which suggests it's not that well known. With the number of
hard drive problems that this group sees, I've posted a note to this
effect for everyone's interest.

The only thing that you need to have, is something else to write your
recovered data to, as you can't write to another partition on the drive
you are recovering from. You could use a diskette, if you have a few
thousand of them lying around, but I used my zip drive. When I phoned
Iomega to figure out how to run the zip under dos, they knew about Lost
and Found and rated it highly.

I have since discovered that you can download a demo of this software from
the PowerQuest web site. The demo will not recover your files, but will do
all the analysis to tell you what the program will be able to recover.
Sounds like a good deal. The software comes on just two diskettes and runs
under Dos.

Hopefully this might help you to help someone else who is sitting there
with their head in their hands, just as I was a week ago."

Thanks Justin. Hopefully this will help someone.


New Icons for your URL
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If you are using IE5 and clicked on the link for the NBC story about the
Microsoft case, you will notice that in the address bar there is a small
icon that looks like the NBC peacock instead of the original IE icon. How
did this happen? This is one of the new features of IE5. You can have an
icon located in the same folder as your web page called favicon.ico that
will replace the old icon. You can use a 16-colour icon that is 16x16. I
plan on making one soon and it might be a good idea for you to as well as
it might help your web site stick out of a collection of favorites.

Remember that this icon can only be seen in IE5.


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Lastly, send in your comments, tips and news and you too can be included in
The PC Improvement News with a reference to your name and web site.
Send email to pcinews@pcimprovements.com
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Well, that's all for this week. Remember that if there is anything that you
want to learn about, let me know and I will try to accommodate you. Also,
feel free to send any comments about the newsletters and the topics covered.
This newsletter is sent to those who subscribed only. We don't believe in
SPAM, so if you have somehow gotten this and you don't want it, please see
the subscribe/unsubscribe options at the start of the newsletter.

The PC Improvement News is brought to you by PC Improvements. The opinions
expressed are those of the editor, Graham Wing. PC Improvements and Graham
Wing accept no responsibility (either good or bad) for the results obtained
from trying the tips in this newsletter.
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Editor: Graham Wing can be reached at editor@pcin.net

Copyright 1999, PC Improvements and Graham Wing. All rights reserved.
This publication may be reproduced in whole, or in part, as long as the
editor is notified.

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