President's Message

Imagine being able to make a duplicate of your car and storing it away just in case the one you use breaks down, is damaged or stolen. It’s called warranty protection and collision and theft insurance. But what if you’re protecting something far more intangible, something that may be even more precious and yet irreplaceable--your computer data files? A system crash, hard drive failure, or virus attack can do more than ruin your day--it can slow or suspend your operations, or put you out of business in the time it takes to say oops! (Expletives deleted).

PowerQuest is a successful software developer and technology pioneer that offers doomsday solutions for people and businesses that take their computing seriously. These utilities allow you to back up your files on the fly, create extra partitions on your hard drive, or mirror (clone) your system onto other drives or partitions. Like a movie in reverse, they can even put you back to an earlier time before you tried to install that diagnostic utility and your system crashed or clicked to open that JPG of Anna Kournikova–all without having to tap into a single line of stem cells.

Gene and Linda Barlow have been hawking PowerQuest products at DACS meetings for several years. What makes their presentations so informative is that they do more than sell software; they provide interesting tips on how to manage your hard drives and protect your system (see the article on page 10).

More resources needed

Have you ever seen things slow to a crawl on your PC, and had a message come up saying system resources are dangerously low . . . remove programs to free up more memory? Well, that’s the message we’ve been getting at DACS recently. If you’re a regular reader of the monthly board minutes, you will see that we have been spending a lot of time discussing ways to stem the decline in membership and offer new services and activities to our members.

Membership decline is a common phenomenon for user groups these days, as the digital age begins to lose its novelty and computer users turn to the Internet for their information needs. There’s a feeling that the new technology revolution is entering a peacetime phase, and that the momentum of change will slow and become more user friendly.

Will user groups fade into irrelevance? I don’t think so. Technology is already going through some growing pains, as millions of down and out Tykoon techies and nerd-do-wells plying the back streets of cyberspace have found out. UGs still have a strong role to play as networks for job seekers and resources for learning new skills. As Web commerce begins to recover, vast new opportunities and choices will emerge, and user groups will be there to lead the way.
But we cannot succeed without your help. Here’s what you can do:

Recruit a member. Tell a friend about DACS and bring them to our next monthly meeting.
Start a SIG. You don’t have to be an expert or a great organizer. Just get a few members to meet and share problems and solutions.

Become a volunteer. DACS has many useful missions, but few volunteers to carry them out. Technical skills are useful, but not required.

Write for dacs.doc. Whether gurus or greenhorns, we all share one important characteristics–we’re all deeply interested in computing. We can’t find answers without asking questions, and we want to learn from each other’s mistakes as well as share their accomplishments.

Sell DACS. Tell someone about how to get their business message to close to 500 dedicated computer users by advertising in dacs.doc.

--Allan Ostergren
dacsprez@aol.com