dacs.doc electric

Random Access

Instant Replay: May 2000

Bruce Preston, Moderator

Members who are unable to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to askdacs@aol.com. Q. (AskDacs) I have an old Amiga 2000 with Amiga OS 3.1 and a Commodore 1084S monitor. I need a hardware and software checkup/tuneup. I read Amiga 0S 3.5 is now available. I have tried to copy “ibrowse2 master” but had the processed cancelled by an error message “cylinder 74.” I can get online with TCP but only get error messages (NO DNS) with ibrowse. A. We gave a veteran Amiga user who recognized the problem your e-mail address. He will respond. Q. Must DLL files (Dynamic Link Library files) be placed in the Windows System subdirectory? A. By convention, when a DLL may be used by more than one application, especially if it may be used by applications written by different vendors, the recommended location for the DLL is the Windows System library. If the DLL is application-specific, the convention is that the DLL should be placed in the program directory of the application, or a subdirectory of the program directory. The reason for this is to reduce the incidence of redundant copies of the same file, and to insure that the most recent copy of the DLL is used. Unfortunately, there are sometimes backward compatibility problems, or a carelessly written installation program may replace a more recent DLL with an obsolete one, breaking other programs. The Windows operating system will look for a DLL in the directory of the application program, then in the WINDOWS and WINDOWS\SYSTEM directories, and then in each directory named in the PATH environment variable. The PATH environment variable is set in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. Note that some DLLs must have entry points (names of pieces of instruction code) placed in the system registry, so just placing the files in a directory may not be sufficient. There is a system utility—regsvr32.exe—in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory that may be used to register .DLL, .OCX files. It is run from the DOS command prompt and requires the full path and filename (including extension) as a command line argument. Q. When I use Netscape to examine a downloadable file, such as a PDF file, and I click on the file, the associated application is executed on the file in-place. I would prefer to bring the file into my machine and then examine it. How do I do this? A. Right—click on the icon or URL for the file, and then select SAVE TARGET AS. Q. In Internet Explorer 5, is there an easy way to delete an item in the Favorites List? A. Right—click on it and select DELETE. Q. In Netscape Communicator 4.7, I moved stuff from my Inbox to Trash, but now it is still in Trash. How do I really get rid of it? A. From FILE menu, select EMPTY TRASH, then FILE menu, then COMPACT MAILBOX. What is happening here is that the mail messages are really stored in a database rather than in separate files—for security. When you “delete” them, they are marked as being deleted and moved to a folder “Trash” but aren’t really gone. EMPTY TRASH marks them as truly deleted, but the space that they held in the database isn’t given back to the operating system. The COMPACT MAILBOX action re-writes a new copy of the database, skipping the space that had been occupied by deleted objects. Q. I need help with hooking up a cable modem. I have a place in Rhode Island that has cable modem service. The machine is a notebook and needs a NetGear PCMCIA network card to connect to the cable modem. The drivers for the PCMCIA network card have a memory/port address that conflicts with the NeoMagic video on the notebook. How do I fix this? A. Your problem is not really related to the cable modem; the problem is with the network card that is used to communicate with it. The memory/port addresses must be unique. One or the other has to be moved. You might be able to move the videocard addresses through Control Panel / System / Device Manager / Display Adapter / Properties / Resources. If not, since you can’t change the video adapter in the notebook, you will have to find a PCMCIA network card that uses a different pair of memory/port addresses. Check with the vendor’s tech support before you purchase the card. Cards from 3Com and XirCom were suggested. Visit the NeoMagic site http://www.neomagic.com, where you will find links to vendors who use their chipset. The tech support pages for the particular vendor of your machine might address the issue. Note that NeoMagic does not provide the support to end users, as the hardware vendors control how their chipset is used. There is no way to get at the chipset other than through the mechanism(s) provided by your particular hardware manufacturer. Q. Speaking of Newsgroups, I don’t like the newsgroup reader that comes with Netscape 4.5. I use the offline newsgroup reader, which results in there being a lot of obsolete stuff on my machine. Periodically it purges stuff, but only when it determines that it is necessary. Is there a way to manually force the cleanup? A. Not with the reader you are using. Try downloading a purpose-built newsreader such as Gravity, which lets you control such things as well as filter messages (Bozo filtering, for example.) Here is a site with links to several readers: http://www.gdn.net/software/newsgroups.html Q. I accidentally deleted several required Windows 95 files, and now my machine won’t boot at all, not even in “Safe Mode.” How do I recover? A. Build a bootable DOS diskette, or borrow a Windows 95/98 recovery diskette. You will need a CD-ROM driver-the CD-ROM IDE driver from Oak that is included with Windows 98 is excellent, and perhaps MSCDEX. Once you can boot with this diskette, you should be able to see your CD-ROM drive. Put the Windows 95 CD in the drive and run SETUP. Setup will discover that you already have Windows 95 on the machine (although damaged) and will offer to do a repair—do so. If it finds that newer files exist, do not replace them. If your registry wasn’t deleted, you will not have to reinstall applications. Q. Is DSL better than cable modem? A. A lot of members wish that they were in a position to be able to make a choice-usually only one or the other is available. DSL probably has a slight edge in that it is a private circuit, where a cable modem is a shared circuit whose capacity can go down as the number of active subscribers on the circuit goes up. However, DSL has very stringent requirements as to how close you must be to the telephone company’s central office (CO, the red brick building downtown). If you are too far away, DSL won’t work. The length of the run from the cable service provider’s site does not affect a cable modem. Both have security implications, so be sure to check www.grc.com and go to the ShieldUp subpages for discussions on security, Web-based tools for checking, and links to available firewall products. Q. Does anyone have experience with Mondus Business to Business services? A. None. This is a “match maker” for B2B transactions. Visit http://www.mondus.com/general/faq.cfm for details. Q. Does anyone use SNET’s ADSL service? What is your throughput? A. Several users reported that they are getting 384K and higher as a download rate. Note that by definition ADSL has a faster download speed than upload speed. If you primarily receive data, then ADSL service is fine. Q. I use a program called @GUARD, which is a personal system firewall. It prevents cookies from being written to my machine, and also blocks system queries from other machines. Every once in a while I get a message that a machine at address nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn is querying my machine, and @GUARD asks if I should let it. What is this, and should I let it? A. When you are connected to the Internet, you get a unique address (similar to a phone number) that is known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address. It is in the format of 4 sets of numbers, separated by dots. Each number may be on the range of 0 to 255. If you have a dial-up account, the numbers are assigned dynamically by your Internet Service Provider-this greatly reduces the number of addresses that are in use-otherwise, with the current address scheme, there wouldn’t be enough addresses to go around. In addition to an address associated with each machine, there are also “ports,” which you could think of as being equivalent to “extensions” in the telephone analogy. For example, a Web-page server is usually associated with port 80, the TelNet server (a terminal server common to Unix) is associated with port 23, etc. A query is a machine asking your machine if a particular service (such as a Web page server) is available on your machine. You are unlikely to be running a TelNet server or a Web-page server without knowing it, but some services, such as File and Print Sharing are present by default. Your firewall is blocking this. Note that sometimes the query may be relatively innocuous or accidental. For example, pcAnywhere, a popular remote-control application, has a habit of looking for other copies of pcAnywhere, and if it isn’t properly configured, it will look for other copies across the Internet in the same subnet (meaning the block of addresses reserved by your ISP). Think of these as a “wrong numbers.” If you find that you are getting a lot of queries from the same address, then you might be the target of an attack. Report the address to your ISP, who have tools that can identify probe source, and should investigate. Q. I get a GPF from Excel 4 under Windows 3.11 DOS 6.2. I get an EMM386 error #6. A. The most frequent cause of this is a conflict in memory usage-EMM386 (Expanded Memory Manager) is trying to use memory for program purposes that is being used by the videocard. If program instruction code is stored in an area of memory that the videocard then writes to, the program instruction code would be changed causing a crash. The GPF kicks in to prevent damage. The cure is to tell EMM386 what memory to not use. This is done via setting(s) in the SYSTEM.INI file. We dug out an old tech support CD (Windows 3.1 is no longer supported at the Microsoft site) and found this in knowledge base article Q142116 dated 2/27/98. You will need to determine the address(es) used by your videocard, but you might want to try the example range of C800-CFFF, since that is a common videoblock. The EMMExclude statement in the System.ini file specifies a range of memory that Windows will not scan to find unused address space. This statement has the side effect of turning off the RAM and ROM search code for the range. The range (two paragraph values separated by a hyphen) must be between A000 and EFFF. This scanning can interfere with some adapters that use the same memory area. The starting value is rounded down and the ending value is rounded up to a multiple of 16K. For example, you could set EMMExclude=C800- CFFF to prevent Windows from scanning the addresses C800:0000 through CFFF:000F. You can specify more than one range by including more than one EMMExclude line. NOTE: If any upper memory block (UMB) provider is installed in the Config.sys file, this switch has no effect in the region the UMB provider is using. The UMB provider has priority in the UMB area. For this reason, you should disable the UMB provider (such as EMM386.EXE), restart the system, and then try the WIN /D:X switch. The System.ini setting for this is as follows: EMM Exclude=<paragraph-range> There is no default setting. To change this setting, use a text editor such as Windows Notepad to edit the System.ini file. It is very important that you type this line in the System.ini file exactly as it appears above. Any errors-including a difference in case-can cause Windows to ignore the setting in the System.ini file.