dacs.doc electric

Random Access
August 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 hard disk that is starting to make a clicking sound. It is a fairly new (less than a year) Compaq 5900T Presario machine with a 10GB hard drive. Should I be concerned? A. There is a possibility that it is as simple as needing some ‘housekeeping’ such as needing your temporary files to be deleted and the drive defragged. Download an evaluation copy of OnTrack Data Advisor (free) which should tell you if the drive is OK. A single machine license is $19.95. A machine this young should have the SMART software for drive monitoring enabled, which means that the hardware should alert you to a problem with a drive. Having said that, be aware that although drives that are sold at retail typically have a 5 year warranty, the same drive, if sold in a machine has the warranty provided by the machine vendor rather than the drive vendor, and the drive will typically only have a one year warranty. The drive vendors can tell by the drive’s serial which type of warranty coverage is in place. So if the drive is marginal, get it fixed now. Q. When I start Net Meeting I get my video image in real time. My machine is a P-III 700 with 384MB of RAM, which I would expect to be more than adequate. However when I connect, the other end’s video is choppy/slow motion, and mine video appears to be a frozen frame. A. Follow up revealed that although you have a broadband (Cable modem) connection, the other end is a 56K dial-up. Net Meeting can only run as fast as the slowest link--and for a 56K dial-up link, that means that video will stream from only one camera. Your friend is only able to send at about 28K--his nominal 56K connection is for downloading only. Q. I will be spending some time in Denmark, Maine. Is there a way that I can get access into my ISP from there? Is there a national number that I can get temporary service without having to signup for an account? A. Some national carriers, such as AT&T and Earthlink have 800 numbers, which are available at a surcharge. Some ISPs have a reciprocal revenue sharing system where you can access your home ISP via a local ISP. There is probably a surcharge for this, but it will let you get at your ‘home’ service. Q. The icons on the left end of the task bar have disappeared. What happened and how do I get them back? A. These icons are in the ‘Quick Launch’ folder. If it disappeared, right click on the task bar, and select Toolbars. You will see Quick Launch there, click it to place a check next to it--this will restore the Quick Launch area to the task bar. Q. Related question: How do I control things in the part of the task bar adjacent to the clock? A. This area of the task bar is called the System Tray. Things are usually loaded there via software or via entries in the system registry, placed there via the application’s install program. Often the icon in the System Tray may be activated via an option in the application’s TOOLS or PREFERENCES menu. There is no user-friendly way to add items to the System Tray. To remove, it is often done by right clicking the icon, and selecting EXIT. It will then ask if you want to just suspend, in which case it will load next time you start Windows, or if you want to remove the item from the System Tray. Q. I get an attachment that is supposed to be an image, but there is no ‘file type extension’ on the filename, so I don’t know what application to use to open it. How do I view it? A. In Windows, the extension is usually the ‘tip off’ as to what kind of file it is. Some applications will sample the file to determine if it has a recognizable header, and if so, will open the file for viewing. Try QuickView Plus, Conversion Plus, and CompuPic. Alternatively, contact the sender and determine what the file was, then rename the attachment with the appropriate extension. Then Windows should be able to launch the appropriate viewer. Q. The clock on my laptop loses 10 minute once a week, then runs correctly the rest of the week if I reset it. What would cause it to periodically drop 10 minutes? A. You probably have an anti-virus utility that is scheduled to run once a week, and it is taking over control of the machine to the extend that the machine is dropping time-of-day clock tick interrupts. An anti-virus program when doing a scan is really working the hard disk hard, as a result the refresh the clock updates aren’t happening at the frequency that they should. Probably the easiest way to ‘fix’ is to just know when the AV application has run and check and reset the clock afterwards. If you have a broadband connection available to the machine, you could also install one of several freeware utility programs that will keep your system’s clock in synch with one of the US Bureau of Standards (or US Navy’s) atomic clocks. Take a look at www.worldtimeserver.com/atomic-clock/ or www.zdnet.com/downloads/stories/info/0,10615,80245,00.html Q. I need a mechanism to get high quality images of screens for various applications--I don’t mean what you get if you do a PrintScrn--they are too course for high quality printing (as in Lithography, as opposed to the resolution you get with a personal printer.) A. Go the press relations page for the software vendor. They can often point you to files in EPS format. Q. I have a font on my Mac that I would love to be able to use in PC software, but I can’t find the font. Is there a way to convert? A. If you are going to be doing a lot of this, look at MacroMedia’s Fontographer program. It retails for $349. There is also a web site full of fonts and equivalents—www.myfonts.com which has fonts, utilities and more. Give it a look.