The PC Improvement News
Issue 1-41
July 21, 1999
ISSN 1488-3163
Published electronically by PC Improvements (c) 1999
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit
http://www.pcin.net/
Note 1: If any of the links are too long, please cut and
paste.
Note 2: You can only win one contest every 30 days.
Welcome to the 41st 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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I spent all day Thursday last week at Comdex Canada. What
a show! There were
a lot of neat things, so most of the content for this week's
newsletter
comes from what I saw there.
All seems to be going well with my list server.
I changed my whole site around so I could make use of Server
Side Includes
(SSI). If you have visited the site and received a 404 error,
please use the
menu on the left of every page to find what you are looking
for. I just
changed file names. I didn't delete anything.
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THOUGHT OF THE WEEK
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"It is not for man to rest in absolute contentment. He
is born to hopes and
aspirations."
-
Robert Southey
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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COMDEX NEWS
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Presentation Boards of the Future
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SMART Technologies Inc., a company based in Calgary, Alberta,
has several
Whiteboards that record what you write on them and send it
to a computer so
you can save your presentation notes. The coolest board appeared
to be a
giant touch screen monitor. It must have been about a 50"
screen and it was
touch sensitive. If you wanted the start menu, you just touched
that part of
the screen and up it popped. It is such a useful thing. I
have seen so many
presentations where people are using a laptop and projecting
it to a screen.
They have to keep going back and forth in order to point things
out, and
then to move to the next slide. This allows you to spend all
of your time at
the screen and you can run the program and anything else on
your computer
with your finger. There was also a cordless keyboard that
went with it.
For more info:
http://www.smarttech.com/
Secure Biometric Identification
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One of my favourite parts of Mission Impossible (the movie)
was the neat
authentication methods that they supposedly use at CIA headquarters.
Well,
Key Tronic, the well-known keyboard manufacturer, has branched
out to this
sort of thing. Using Identicator Technology, they have built
a fingerprint
reader into the side of the keyboard. The example I saw was
on a Windows NT.
When the logon screen came up, you just put your finger on
it and if you
were in their database, then you were accepted. Otherwise,
you couldn't
login. It was really neat. I highly recommend you visit their
web site. They
have a nice description of the product.
For more info:
http://www.keytronic.com/
http://www.keytronic.com/secure/secure_index.htm
What is Solid Ink?
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I was visiting the Tektronix booth and on top of one of their
printers,
there was sitting what looked like 4 coloured rayon blocks.
They were about
2" square. It turns out that it was "solid ink."
The printer was the
Tektronix Phaser 840 Color Printer. I can't explain how it
all works, but
the output was amazing. You can read a white paper about it
at
http://www.tek.com/Color_Printers/products/840/Solid_Advantage.pdf
For more info:
http://www.tek.com/
http://www.tek.com/Color_Printers/products/840/840fe.htm
Business Card CDs
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I guess this isn't really new, but it is still neat. Avomedia,
a company
based in Switzerland, makes CDs that are the size of a business
card. Yes,
they are rectangular, but they can still be read in a regular
CD-ROM drive.
You can print what you want on the front (your normal business
card design
if you want) and you can even record things to the CD. You
can fit just
under 30MB of data on the CD. You could include a PDF brochure,
sample
files, your web site, etc. If you buy enough of them, they
are priced quite
reasonably. You can get 1000 of them for $2000. That is only
$2 a CD. Not
bad.
For more info:
http://www.avomedia.ch/
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THE NEWS
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Free PC Back in the News
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Thanks to Johnathon for pointing this out to me. Several months
ago, Free PC
was accepting applications from people who wanted a free PC.
You would get
free Internet service and agree to watch some ads on your
screen and you
would get a free computer. Hundreds of thousands of people
went to the site
to apply for the 10,000 available PCs. It has been several
months, and many
people were starting to think that nothing would come of it.
Well, Free PC
finally came around and has sent the PCs to the chosen 10,000
and will send
more to others.
They are still accepting applications.
For more info:
http://www.geek.com/techupdate/jul99/freepcbak.htm
http://www.free-pc.com/
Digital Camera/Cell Phone
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It seems that the next big toy will be a cell phone that also
is a digital
camera for taking pictures, or even for doing video conferencing.
Most cell
phone manufacturers are working on this. Nokia has a phone
available in
Europe that has an infrared port that is for communicating
with a Casio or
JVC digital camera. Motorola has a similar product. Kyocera,
a company in
Japan, has a product called the VP-210 VisualPhone which they
claim is the
world's first videophone that transmits and receives in real-time.
Bell Canada Problem
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Last Friday, there was an "explosion" at a Bell
Canada switching station in
Toronto. This disrupted a lot of telecommunications across
Canada. Phones
weren't ringing, the Internet was down, and bank machines
(ATMs) were down.
People as far away as Vancouver in Canada and Chicago in the
US could not
reach Toronto.
A lot of people were saying that this is what would happen
on January 1 next
year.
For more info:
http://www.thestar.com/thestar/back_issues/ED19990717/news/990717NEW01_CI-MAIN17.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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Q1) Is there any way you can get better help from tech support
from your
computer company? I have been tying to get help for the past
three months
from XXXXXXXX. The only voice I have heard is that of a recording,
for three
months.
A1) Ken Barry said, "If the individual is having trouble
getting help for a
defective product or something similar, MaximumPC Magazine
operates a very
aggressive assistance section labeled "Dog Pound"
at this URL
http://www.maximumpcmag.com/forums/index.html#dogpound.
If the powers that
be refuse to be contacted a very nasty "label" is
put on the company for
future endeavors. These people usually get situations resolved
quickly for
you. And they love doing it."
New Questions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Q1) In common with many professionals I rely on my notebook
PC for my work.
My current one is on its third screen and the keyboard is
playing up.
Are you or your readers aware of any comparative statistics
on machine
reliability? Notebooks do have a hard life but being without
one is a real
pain when you use it all the time and there must be scope
to select a
machine on the basis of reliability as well as other features,
if there is
any data around.
Q2) I have a problem with my CMOS battery. Each time I boot
up the following
message appear :- CMOS Checksum Error - Defaults Loaded CMOS
Battery failed
I have changed the CMOS battery twice, its a lithium ion battery,
but the
message/problem persist. My feeling is that the problem is
my motherboard,
which is a super 7 motherboard. Please advise.
Q3) I had installed a "shareware" program and it
expired, so instead of
removing it I just put my computer calendar back a month or
two so I could
continue to use it. Then I decided to uninstall it, but something
strange
happened::::::::::::: every single file on my computer has
had a new "date"
assigned to it of 1 January 1980. What happened???????
If you have any answers to these questions, please email
me at
freehelp@pcin.net
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THE TIPS and OTHER STUFF
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Recording WAV files (sent in by Tom Parr)
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I never knew it was this easy to record your CDs to play as
WAV files.
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http://www.microsoft.com/INSIDER/windows95nt/articles/wavefiles.htm
Recording WAV files from your music CDs
Multimedia rules.
To communicate your point in these high-tech times, you
can write some snappy text and create eye-catching graphic
designs. But you
can make an even bigger impression on your audience by adding
audio clips to
your memos or slide presentations.
Unfortunately, the challenge for most Windows 95 users is
figuring out how
to record anything on their computers. If you're one of those
people who
think a WAV file must have something to do with the ocean,
this article is
for you. As long as you can play music CDs on your computer,
you can use the
Windows 95 Sound Recorder applet to record selections from
your CDs. In this
article, we'll show you how.
The hardware
If you want to record your voice, your system needs to have
a built-in
microphone or an audio card with a microphone. However, if
all you have is
an audio card that allows you to play music CDs, you can start
recording
music clips immediately. The Windows 95 Sound Recorder provides
the basic
tools you need to record and edit musical selections from
your CD player.
Technique overview
In general, to record selections from your music CDs, you
launch Microsoft's
CD Player applet (or any other CD-playing software you may
have installed)
and the Sound Recorder. You'll find both of those applets
by choosing the
Multimedia option of the Accessories menu. Simply cue your
music CD to a
point just before where you want to start recording and click
the Play
button. Then, click the Sound Recorder's Record button. Of
course, you'll
click the Sound Recorder's Stop button to end recording.
Once you've recorded the sound clip, you can save the file
by opening the
Sound Recorder's File menu and choosing the Save or Save As
option. When you
save such a file, Windows assigns the WAV extension. Once
you've saved the
WAV file to disk, you can play it with Sound Recorder, or
you can include
the WAV file in applications that support OLE. (To learn how
to add a sound
file to a WordPad document or a PowerPoint presentation, see
the article
"Sounding Off in Your Documents.")
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CONTEST RESULTS
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Thank you to everyone for suggesting all of these sites. The
winners this
week are Ken Berry and John Tounoussidis. Congratulations
to you both.
Ken's winning suggestion was:
http://www.webopedia.com/
has helped me immensely with plain English
definitions and explanations for computing & Internet,
terms and technology.
I'm not a guru, but thanks to this site I can shut some people
down when
they start spouting out false info.
John's winning suggestion and explanation was:
I would like to nominate http://download.cnet.com/
it has helped me heaps
instead of going to hundreds of web pages looking for tools
and programs I
just go there and wolla everything is there for me to download.
The site is
user friendly. Every program is explained. And best of all
its idiot proof.
Basically I LOVE IT!
Here are all of the other sites that were suggested.
Charlie Moore:
I only recently discovered Frank Condron's World-O-Windows.
If you need any
help finding drivers this is a must page.
Martin Barron:
I've just upgraded my MB from a 133 vanilla Pentium to an
AMD K6-2 3d 400.
The difference is pleasantly noticeable, especially when manipulating
graphics and has saved me buying a new PC to keep up to date
The site that
helped me most http://www.jump.net/~lcs/kalle/index.htm
an absolute mine of
information on the ASUS T2P4 motherboard but also useful for
other socket 7
users.
Also to be recommended do a newsgroup search for your motherboard
or
processor brand name, there is a lot of help out there eg
alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus
You can't do much better than subscribe to your newsletter!
Keep up the good
work.
Bob Patten:
My most helpful site has to be the newsgroup news://alt.windows95
There is
always someone there to assist with problems and just thumbing
through the
messages gives a pretty good education for use of Win95.
Jumpin' Johnathon:
Outside of your newsletter, I frequent "U-Geek"
at http://www.geek.com/
The
name may not be that flattering, but they have a broad selection
of topics.
Larry Johnson:
The site that has helped me the most is PC Improvement
http://www.pcimprovements.com/
or more to the point Mr. Wing. I was losing
a tremendous amount of valuable time because I couldn't get
my Defragmenter
to work, after consulting with him my entire life has been
rosy.
Mark Milks:
I don't want you to think I'm trying to give you the answer
you want to
hear, but I think http://www.pcimprovements.com/
does the trick for me. The
"people" always respond quickly and accurately.
Most times I receive an
answer the same day. I do not try to pretend to be a computer
genius. This
can be a problem when you try to describe your problem. Many
help sites seem
too overwhelming or intimidating. PC Improvements is a very
down to Earth
help site. They take the time to explain why something may
be causing a
problem not just a set response. I also very much like the
fact that they
always give you several other sites to further diagnose your
concern. Plus,
if they can't help you they will tell you. Not just baffle
you. Since I have
become a PCI reader and "member" I really don't
look to far for other help
sites, unless referred. I feel that with PCI I not only get
the right answer
but I actually learn something. That's something we all can
stand to do a
little of, whether we admit it or not. Sometimes I think other
help sites
might not even respond to some of my simple questions. But
like PCI once
told me "That's how we all learn, by doing" and
you're gonna' make mistakes.
Randy Dunaway:
This is a site that a friend of mine has, who is really knows
his stuff on
computers. Even though I repair them myself as a small business,
this guy is
my guru whom I refer to when I have questions. This page teaches
HTML and is
really good.
http://www.webhelp.org/
Judy Wilson:
You asked about people that helped with computers, gosh these
folks are
great. http://www.apcpro.com/
Phil is wonderful and very patient.
Phil Collins:
In response to your request for feedback on useful Internet
sites, one I
have found very useful is http://www.smartcomputing.com/
which has an
excellent range of articles on all aspects of computing, and
search
facilities to help you find what you need. Perhaps the main
attraction for
me is that you don't have to be a computer whiz to understand
the
information presented as all articles are written in layman's
language, but
despite this the articles go into considerable detail, with
diagrams and
photos as appropriate.
A second site that I found quite by accident, is now called
http://www.bjpinchbeck.com/ (Link no longer works)
. The site was put together by a young lad and
his father to document the many Internet sites they visited
in search of
answers to the youngsters homework. The kid must be a bit
of a genius if his
homework included the contents of some of the sites - but
nonetheless it is
a treasure-trove of links to a myriad of other sites containing
information
on a wide range of subjects including law, history, medicine,
computing,
maths, science, music, art, languages, .......... This is
one site I return
to frequently.
A third site containing dozens of articles of general interest
is Marshall
Brain's 'How Stuff Works' site (http://www.howstuffworks.com/).
If you need
to know how some piece of technology or an everyday appliance
works this is
the site to visit. Once again the articles are written in
clear concise
language which is suitable for a wide age group.
Any of the above sites is well worth a visit.
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NO NEW CONTEST
----------------------------------------------------------------
No contest this week. I need to think up some new ones as
I still have some
prizes. If you have any suggestions, let me know. No prizes
for these
suggestions, but you may win a prize in the actual contest.
Email me at
editor@pcin.net with
your suggestions.
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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.