| (1) Officers, Helplines, S.I.G.s (2) President's Corner Spence Stimler (3) Web Wanderings Gil Smith (4) Systems S.I.G. Dick Trissel (1) Officers, Helplines, S.I.G.s (2) President's Corner Spence Stimler (3) Web Wanderings Gil Smith (4) Systems S.I.G. Dick Trissel ... (6) A Computer Story Charles Barney CCCC Page 3 February 2004 WEB WANDERINGS By Gil Smith A BODE OF GODE COOKERY I know you are sitting there going "what the heck kind of a title is that?" Well, I thought the same thing. Welcome to a site about medieval recipes for your 21st century kitchen. This one is definitely a keeper. There are tons of recipes on this site, from medieval to renaissance cooking, and a little something thrown in for you gentlemen chefs. You definitely want to check out the section "A Word from the Cook" to get up- to-date info and current news on the site and the cook. I'm off to the kitchen now to make dowcetts (A delicious sounding tart)! http://www.godecookery.com/godeboke/godeboke.htm WHALE NET Whale Net focuses on whales and marine research. The page comes in four different languages as well. Whether you are a student, a teacher, or just curious you can easily enjoy surfing through this site. I highly recommend taking the Whale Net tour. It will give you a nice overview of the site features and it is well put together. Follow the links and have fun. I also think you'll enjoy the satellite tracking section. Dive in! http://whale.wheelock.edu/Welcome.html YO-YO UNIVERSE First of all, ignore the shopping links (unless you need a new yo-yo), this site was too cool to pass up. I like yo-yos and hope you all do too. You can get information on yo-yo events, news tips and tricks, chat, the pro spinner's club, and information for you parents out there. I love the tips and tricks section: you can learn how to do the moves, and if you have a question you can ask the experts. I think my favorite move is probably "Walk the Dog". What's yours? http://www.yoyouniverse.com/ INTERNET MOVIE DATABASE At the Internet Movie Database you can find out just about anything about any movie, actor, director etc. From the top selling movie at the box office right down to the most obscure release. This is your complete movie database, from children's movies to your favorite action thriller. Surfin' around this site you can check out the movies now playing like "Daredevil" and "How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days", or "The Hours". You can check out your favorite childhood movie like "Mystic Pizza" or "Goonies". Check out the Quote section for memorable lines from favorite movies. And for those of you who love independent films, there is a whole section devoted just to that. So come on you movie buffs, check it out. http://us.imdb.com/ - CCCC Page 4 February 2004 SYSTEMS S.I.G. by Dick Trissel After a three-month hiatus I thought there would be a large attendance with many questions and problems. I guess the State Of The Union speech kept some home. Actually, the reduction in attendees to the SIG (23) made the room a little more comfortable. It will probably continue that way with Charles having an excellent Digital Imaging SIG, and Gerry starting a Genealogy SIG in the library. There were a lot of questions and advice. My advice was to re-iterate the caution about not putting labels on compact discs. It is being discovered that the adhesive can damage the data layer, which is directly under the top surface of the disc. Of course, everyone knows by now not to try to remove a labelit strips the data layer off the disc. Also, you should not write on the disc where there is data beneath that area. It is safe to write on the clear portion of the hub, and toward the outer edge where there is no data directly below it. On most CDs you can see the data from the bottom side as a gray area. I also discussed the four methods of constructing a dual-boot configuration with Windows 98 or ME, and Windows XP. In three of the methods you must have at least two partitions on the hard drive. The fourth method requires two hard drives. The easiest to use is to install Windows 98/ME in one partition, and then install Windows XP in the other partition. Windows XP will automatically create a dual-boot configuration in which you choose the operating system at computer turn-on or restart. This only works with a fresh installation of Windows XPit won't make the dual-boot if it is an upgrade installation. This method has the advantage of giving you visibility into both partitions at the same time with Windows Explorer; if XP is in a FAT32 system, not NTFS. The other two methods, using two partitions, requires using the program PartitionMagic (which you can use to make the partitions), and/or BootMagic (which comes with PartitionMagic). In either method you put the operating systems in their partitions. Then either install BootMagic to get dual- boot capability (with visibility only in the active partition); or use PartitionMagic to manually select the active partition. If you also "unhide" the other partition, you will have visibility into both partitions at once. Again, if XP is in a FAT32 system, not NTFS. The fourth method simply puts each operating system on separate hard drives. You then select the boot drive from the BIOS screen during boot- up. It requires you know how to select the BIOS setup screen and edit the BIOS. - CCCC Page 5 February 2004 DIGITAL IMAGING SIG - January '04 Recap By Charles Barney I was pleased to see about 30 of you who turned out for my very first SIG at the January meeting. Thank you for your patience while the group's format is in flux. With your continuing participation and suggestions, I'm sure that we will find a general structure that suits the majority of members. Some of you came prepared with questions that you were hoping to find immediate answers to. Although I did attempt to address your questions as best as possible within the time frame, my focus at the first meeting was primarily on getting to know you and finding out what your interests are. About 80 percent of you indicated that you owned a digital camera; with some, your second or third one. When queried, nearly all the digital camera owners indicated that they wanted to learn more about their cameras. To these folks, I passed out a "home work" assignment to complete before the next meeting. This consisted of a questionnaire type form to list your various camera features, modes, settings, etc. which requires most of us to study the manual (ugh!) that came with our camera. Although manual reading is something that a lot of folks avoid like the plague, I know of no better way to increase your photography skills several-fold in a relatively short period of time. With what remained of our 45 minutes, I demonstrated the Red-Eye Brush Tool in Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. As you may know, red-eye is a common problem that occurs when bright light from the camera flash illuminates the blood vessels of a person's retina and is reflected back into the camera lens, producing a most unflattering red glow effect in the subject's pupils. This tool produces a very natural-looking correction by employing a selective color replacement technique. The offending red tint is replaced with black while preserving the existing highlights in the eye. Next time I will attempt to be more thorough in answering your questions and, time permitting, demonstrate another useful photo-editing technique. You can find my contact information listed in the Helplines section on the front of this newsletter. Call or email me between meetings if you have questions, suggestions or what have you. Do keep in mind that I work full- time on weekdays, but am available at most any other times. NEW GENEALOGY SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP Gerry Miller will be starting a new Genealogy S.I.G. at the February 17 meeting. It will start at 6:00pm in the Library. Members, guests and old closet skeletons are welcome. - CCCC Page 6 February 2004 A COMPUTER STORY By Charles Barney A few weeks ago, I decided to give my system a major upgrade and purchased a new processor (Pentium 4 @ 3 GHz), RAM (2 gigabytes DDR400) and a state- of-the-art motherboard built to handle all this. I had gone to PC Club in Goleta, a trendy computer store with bright young employees. They had recommended this particular combination of components whole-heartedly and I trustingly agreed. After carefully installing the new gear into my old Comstar box at home, I anxiously flipped the power switch. Nothing. Well, the power light did come on for about half a second and then nothing. OK, let's read the directions this time. Geese, I'm sure that the documentation was written by a highly-educated and well-meaning Chinese person, but I found it somewhat difficult to follow since it was incomplete and in very BAD English. A few times through the instructions and a study of the diagrams revealed that I had missed an additional second power connection to the motherboard - a small plus/minus 12 volts plug (never seen that before). Guess what...my power supply didn't have that particular plug in its tangle of wires and connectors. I removed the board and went out hunting for the illusive power connector. I found success at the first place I stopped! At Abro Computers, as soon as I showed the tech my board he says "oh, yea" and quickly retrieves the needed connector from the back of the shop. "Great" I said, "how much do I owe you?" "Nothing" he says, "we got a ton of 'em laying around." So, things are finally starting to go my way! With the motherboard now reinstalled and all the proper power connections in place, I once again flipped the switch. Things got a little further this time. The BIOS and video info screen came up and the RAM count began before the computer spontaneously reset itself. Several attempts later, I was totally stumped. New motherboard out, old one in. At least I'm no worse off and can still use the computer. Next day, old board out and new one in. I hauled the whole business back to PC Club. The tech there figures out that my 300 watt power supply is inadequate for my configuration. He says that each gigabyte of this type RAM alone takes 100 watts (that's 200 just for the memory), which doesn't leave much for the rest of the system. OK, so I buy and have him install a new 400 watt power supply. The system powered up fine and passed POST (Power On Self Test) on his bench test (that's as far as he went). He did say as a parting word of advice that "you may have to repair your operating system because of the new hardware." Huh? Repair? He assured me that all I had to do was insert my XP install CD and select "Repair" and everything would be fine. Well, the tech was right; XP absolutely would not start. After the Windows logo came up it would just reboot - every time. So, I took his advice and booted from the XP install CD. Repairing the operating system is not a straightforward process I discovered. You have to go through a number of steps in Setup just like you were doing a completely new installation, but choose "repair" at a certain point (who would have guessed?). OK, there it is! I click on it, confirm "yes" and then trust the great Microsoft to repair my computer. Poof! It reboots again. Try again, same thing. Dang! In case you were wondering, yes, I'd been through just about everything in the CMOS setup to try and find a solution. New board out, old one back in. Went to the manufacturer's web site and searched the support areas and read all the FAQs. Conclusion: download a revised "bugs fixed" BIOS program and copy to floppy disk for "flashing" the BIOS with the new code. Now flashing the BIOS, as you know, is a potentially very dangerous activity that can easily turn your motherboard into just another piece of electronic junk. Yet, I was undaunted. With the updated BIOS file now copied to a floppy, I took out the old board and put the new one back in. On this board, the flash utility is accessed from the CMOS setup, so any installed operating system is circumvented - pretty cool. Well, upon running the flash program it read the file on the floppy and gave a "BIOS ID Check Error" message and refused to go any further. Maybe I had jumped too many revisions ahead, as the web support site had vaguely cautioned about. The above process was repeated several times, trying all the BIOS updates they had, all with the same result - ZIP! At this point, I was contemplating taxidermy as a replacement hobby. However, on a long-shot hunch, I switched the RAM on the new board with the RAM from my old one. Voila! Much better now! I was able to boot from the XP CD and "repair" my operating system installation (like watching paint dry). After all was done, the computer did the necessary restart and all appeared to be going fine. The Windows logo proudly came up and the startup music played. The desktop was coming back just as I had known it. All my icons were there! Then, as if I hadn't known better, XP informs me that it must be activated within 30 days and would relentlessly nag me until I did! I had heard that replacing a number of hardware devices could trigger XP into activation mode, since it thinks it's installed on a different computer. OK, I wasn't trying to pirate the software; just needed to straighten things out with Microsoft so I could legitimately use my licensed copy. So I chose to start the activation process. It first looked for an Internet connection (it had been really slick activating online before, just a few seconds and done!). But since "repairing" my OS had resulted in losing many of my program configuration settings, no Internet connection was currently available. Alternately, the activation program offered a phone number to call up Microsoft and presumably to plead my case. After taking some deep breaths, I dialed the given 800 number. To my surprise, I didn't get a real person on the other end, I got a talking computer! The voice sounded to me like a female version of the robot on the old "Lost in Space" TV series. But, she was good and guided me capably through the activation process. I was instructed to read the 28- digit code supplied by XP and then hear her speak it back to confirm - check. It took about 5 seconds to process the information before the computer voice came back on and recited the 42-digit Confirmation ID which I had to type in the appropriate boxes that appeared on my screen. I then read back all the numbers for my helpful computer gal to confirm. Got it on the first take! XP was now officially activated. This part actually went pretty well. And I didn't even have to try and convince somebody that I was telling the truth, "cross my heart and hope to die." OK, so things were almost there but there still remained the problem with the RAM. I paid a lot for those 2 gigabytes of ultra-fast memory chips and by gosh, I wanted them to work! Gotta try everything. I'm not (if you haven't already guessed) one to easily give up. Tried swapping the old RAM with the new again and XP would inevitably crash at random times. This was the first time I ever saw XP brought to its knees. From my year or so experience using XP thus far, I had figured it to be invincible. But there it was, albeit a prettier shade than I recalled it ever being, the Blue Screen. What's more, this was no ordinary Win 98 Blue Screen of Death, this was the "new and improved" Blue Screen of Death. Whereas the old OS used to just lock up tighter than a (your vision here), XP attempts to save all the information it can for possible later debugging. No, it's not locked up, it's working hard still. With the ominous message "dumping physical memory to disk" on the screen, it grinds away on the hard drive for about 10 minutes and ends up saving approximately 1.5 gigabyte totally useless file in the Windows directory called MEMORY.DMP. Thank you very much. It didn't take too many repetitions of this futile exercise for it to lose its fun factor. Had I overlooked anything? Of course! The drivers contained on the included motherboard utilities CD! I couldn't believe I missed that. This will surely straighten things out. New RAM out, old RAM in. Pop in the utilities CD and auto-run begins to start the interface. About 3 seconds into startup, the program says that it "has encountered an error and must shut down." Why am I not surprised at this? Check CD drive, all working fine. Attempt to run utilities program from command line, same problem. Bad disk or bad program? I went back to the manufacturer's web site and downloaded the needed drivers. Installed them, no trouble. Did it solve the RAM crash problem? NO. Alright, I'm open to suggestions here. Normally, contacting tech support is something I only do as a very last resort and I was just about out of resorts. I filled out a help request form on the board maker's web site in exhausting detail. They wanted to know practically every detail of my configuration, which required partial disassembly of the system to be able to read model numbers, brand names, etc. I did the best I could. Finally, I typed in a description of my problem and what I had already tried. The message was successfully sent off to the tech support team. A thank you and an assurance that my problem would soon be solved message was displayed along with another that said "Due to the holidays, tech support personnel are on vacation and that it might take longer than normal to receive a response." Sure, no problem. Do I look impatient? It was only about 24 hours until I received an email from another highly educated Chinese fellow named Lawrence. He had a nearly equal mastery of the English language as the documentation writer I mentioned earlier. I did, however, manage to decipher his message. Two things were suggested. One - download and install an even newer BIOS update file. Two - they recommend using RAM only from certain makers (the better, more expensive ones). I tried the former suggestion, again flirting with disaster by flashing my BIOS. No help there. Crashes still persisted. Only one thing was left to do. Pack it all up and take it back to PC Club again. This time I insisted the RAM they sold me was bad and that they put in some better quality stuff. Either make it work or give me a refund on everything, I told them. Fair enough they said, but they were out of the better RAM and it was on back-order. So I left the system at the shop for three days until they informed me that it was "ready to go." No charge. Turns out they put in the very same brand of RAM, but insisted that it was made by a different manufacturer. The other maker was apparently having some quality control problems. With the upgraded computer back home and whole again, I've been putting it through its paces without much trouble so far. Is it finally fixed? The jury is still out... - | |
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