dacs.doc electric

Random Access
July 2001

by Bruce Preston

Members who are unable to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to askdacs@aol.com -- they will be presented at the meeting, and the response(s) will be placed in the Random Access column. Q. I have a computer at work that seems to turn itself on from time to time. I go through "START / SHUTDOWN" to shut it off, but often it is turned on in the morning. I know that no one has touched it since I left. What’s happening? A. Newer PCs support a feature available on certain network cards and/or certain modems. For a network card, it is called "Wake On LAN" or abbreviated WOL; for a modem it is called "Wake On Ring." Essentially, if a machine has this option present (controlled via the BIOS SETUP) then if another machine in the local area network tries to access something on the ‘shutdown’ machine, the network card will cause the machine to power up and boot. Similar situation for a modem. Our guess is that you have file or printer sharing available and some other machine in the network is trying to access a resource on the ‘down’ machine. If you have a centralized tape backup system, it could be causing the wake-up event. To turn this feature off, examine the BIOS settings and see if WOL or WOR are there--and if so, see if you can disable them. Alternatively, there is also a setting in the BIOS that controls the operation of the master power button on the front of the machine--on some it actually causes the machine to go into a ‘sleep’ or ‘suspend’ mode--to do a true power off you must hold the push button for four seconds. This can be changed so that the switch is a true power off. Q. Point of information: You can get 128MB of PC—133 memory for $39 over the internet. I found this via Price Watch. A. A discussion about the availability of a warranty followed for a few minutes--plus that the offer was only available via the internet--no phone orders. Moderator’s note: This was already obsolete by the time I got around to transcribing it for the newsletter. A search at PriceWatch.COM for PC133 memory came up with 128MB for $9 plus $10 shipping and insurance! Q. I am having trouble with the dial-up connection box appearing out of the blue. I thought that it was a program that I had installed--when I exited the program it seemed to stop, but now even with the program off--it still tries to call. A. Subsequent discussion revealed that you have an Intuit product on your machine (Quicken, QuickBooks, etc) These products have a ‘go check for update’ feature that gets installed unless you are very specific about telling it to not install. The application picks a time of day and tries to connect to the Intuit site and search for updated data or program files. These programs that ‘call home’ can usually be defeated by either finding an option in the application, or by deleting a short cut from the Start Menu. Some also hide in the registery. This is a prime example of where you might want to install the free utility StartStop (available from ) which lets you control things that get started from various places in Windows. Although there is such a capability in Windows 98 and Me (MS Config) this utility will work in Windows 95, NT 3.5, 4.0, and 2000 as well. While you are at it, take a look at X-teq X-SETUP ‘super tweak’ utility for Windows that goes far beyond what the popular Microsoft PowerToys TweakUI can do. It is free, downloadable from Q. What is the difference between the DEFRAG that comes with Windows versus the version from Symantec/Norton? A. The version in Windows (95, perhaps some editions of 98) was OEM’ed from Symantec, it is a non-optimized subset of the commercial product, it runs slower and does not have some features such as the ability to ‘wipe’ empty areas of the disk clean of the remains of erased files. Q. When I try to defrag, it keeps restarting! It has never completed. A. That happens if some other program, including Windows, writes to the disk being defragged. You must stop all operating programs when you defrag--including such things as anti-virus applications, etc. You might want to start the system in Safe Mode, and then do the defrag. Q. So I’d be better off purchasing Symantec’s Norton Suite? A. Not necessarily. Components such as System Doctor, etc. may cause more harm than good if they are left continuously running--as they consume lots of machine capacity. The tools are wonderful when used to solve a specific problem, but are not recommended for full-time use on a production machine. Some of the tools, such as Crash Guard, were so problematic that they have been dropped from later releases. Q. What are the relative merits of Windows 98 SE versus Windows Me. Should I upgrade? A. Windows "Me" is the ultimate ‘gamers’ release of Windows. It is great for people into gaming, or heavily into multi-media, etc. It introduced a newer Windows Media Player, for example. It also has a number of nice ‘setup and configuration’ wizards. It probably also cured a few bugs, and introduced a few new ones. It is truly geared towards ‘consumer’ orientation with emphasis on MP3 and MPEG. It has been somehow ‘dumbed down’ when it comes to networking--it has severe difficulties being a client to a Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000 networking environment. If you have Windows 98 SE, you can get just about all of the improvements and bug fixes via service pack CDs, available for download or at a nominal fee. Q. What about Windows 2000 Professional? A. It is probably the most stable and reliable operating system that Microsoft has released to date. (Maybe that’s why they are going to replace it with Windows XP?) However, the stability comes at a price--it is not very receptive to a lot of the ‘interesting’ devices that Windows Me supports, such as the ultra-accelerated video cards and the like that gamers love. You need Windows 2000 specific device drivers; it will usually not work with Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows Me drivers. It is targeted towards the business environment. If your machine and its components are supported, it will be a very stable system. Q. Can I run AOL on Windows 2000? A. When Windows 2000 first came out, AOL said that they would not support it. Since then, I understand that AOL 6 will run on Windows 2000. I can not confirm. Q. I edit and do the page preparation for a newsletter. Someone sends me a document from a Mac, and I can’t read it. The characters are what I understand are a font called "WingDings". A. The author is probably using a font on the Mac that you don’t have on your machine. When this happens, Windows tries to supply an "equivalent" font based upon various characteristics--size, presence/absence of serifs, etc. In your case, the font it selected by Windows was WingDings which consists of all sorts of arrows, buttons, typographical symbols, and other weird stuff. Since you are the editor of the newsletter, have the contributors submit as plain text, tell them that you will do the special formatting. Q. I have a Pentium 700MHz machine with 128MB of RAM. However, I am only seeing 32MB of RAM when the machine goes through its power-up self test. A. First, ask Windows how much memory it sees--you can see this on the first page of the Device Manager (My Computer, Control Panel, System ) If it shows the 128MB then you don’t have a problem. What might be happening is that during the power up self test (POST) the machine has been told (via a BIOS SETUP configuration setting) to test only the lowest parts of memory or skip the memory check entirely. Q. I hit the "Windows" key on the keyboard, followed by "E"--this is supposed to start Explorer. Sometimes it takes forever--other times it pops right up Any idea why? A. It could be that Explorer is looking for a linked drive--if you have fast logon enabled, it won’t try to reconnect to network drives until you explicitly ask for them. Explorer sometimes ‘remembers’ where it was last time it was run--and may be trying to build a directory listing of a now unavailable drive. Q. When I shut down, I get that a program is not responding and it won’t shut the machine down completely. A. Further discussion led to a possible printer-related issue. If the printer support utility program (in the system tray) isn’t unloading when requested to do so, then it will prevent Windows from shutting down.