dacs.doc electric

Random Access
October 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 Windows Me system, and in Windows Explorer, it gives me three ‘window panes.’ How do I get rid of the center one which has a graphic representation with a large icon that represents my hard drive? A. Turn off the "Web View" which makes Windows Explorer behave similar to Internet Explorer, and the large icons will disappear. We recommend that you use the ‘Details’ view, as it provides you with a tabular, and sortable view of the contents of your file folders. Q. I have two printers available to my machine - an HP 870Cse and an Epson Stylus Color 600. When I print the self-test pattern which can be generated by holding buttons when I start the printer, the print quality is excellent. However, the printing from applications is not nearly as good. When I connect the printers to a Mac, the print quality is also good. What might this be? A. It sounds like the printer drivers are not correct, or the settings for the printers are not appropriate for the application. Within the properties page for the printer there is often a page called ‘Color Management’ which might be appropriate--for example this controls print quality as to ‘proof’, ‘draft’, ‘normal’, etc. Q. I have a Canon printer. I would like to make the default print mode gray scale. Does anyone know how to do this? A. We don’t know of any way to make gray scale the default for the printer, however you may be able to make the default for a certain type of document to be gray scale. For example, in a word processing application, you could define a default template which defines the document as being gray scale. Q. I have installed 256MB RAM SDRAM, and the machine now runs noticeably slower than what it had when I only had 128MB. Why would that be? A. Is it possible that your original SDRAM was 60ns PC133 memory and that you put in slower, say 70 or 80ns PC100 memory? If so, the system bus has detected that it is slower memory and had to slow down the entire machine to accommodate the slower memory. When you boot the machine, quite often on the start up screen during the Power On Self Test (POST), it will display the speed at which the memory is running. Your memory will run at the speed of the slowest component. On some machines, it must exactly match or it just plain won’t run. Q. I added memory to my machine, and expected to see 384MB, but it only reports 383MB. What happened to the rest of the memory? A. The number that you see is ‘extended’ memory - the first 640KB is ‘real’ memory and is reported differently from extended memory. The reason for this is that the original machine and DOS were designed expecting an upper limit of 640KB for RAM (random access, or ‘program’ memory) and the addresses above 640KB (up to but not including 1MB) were reserved as addresses for devices--the most notable of which would be the video display, which was assumed to have memory starting at 640KB. Because there is the block of memory between lower ‘standard’ or ‘real’ memory and the extended memory, it has to be counted separately. While not applicable to your machine, we will note at this time that some ‘entry level’ machines from about 3 or four years ago often assigned extended memory and gave it to an onboard video chip to use as video memory. This only appears on machines that have ‘integrated motherboards’ - where the video adapter, as well as perhaps the sound card and modem are all on the motherboard. Thus, you might find that you appear to be 1, 2, 4 or even 8MB ‘short.’ Another situation where memory may appear to be gone is the case of "Shadow RAM." Here, slower memory that is used for the BIOS code may be copied into high-speed memory, and the BIOS run from this faster RAM. This is usually a multiple of 64K, so you probably won’t notice it. Q. Do motherboards limit the amount of memory that can be in a DIMM socket? A. Yes, some may have a limit of 64MB for a particular socket. Memory beyond this may be ignored. You would be advised to check the system specs in the book that came with the motherboard, or find them on the internet. Q. I want to move data from a Windows 98 machine to a machine running Windows XP. Can I use the LapLink that I have on the Windows 95 machine? A. A new release of LapLink was required for Windows 2000; I suspect that you need at least this release for Windows XP. Several suggested using ‘Direct Connect’ which is a parallel port connection that comes bundled within Windows; but this is comparatively slow and ‘dumb’. If you are going to be doing a lot of data transfer, and/or keep the 98 machine in use, and/or share an internet connection, then you might want to look into peer-to-peer networking, which just requires a network interface card (NIC) in each PC, and a Cat-5 "Crossover" cable. If you ever want to add a third machine, then you would also need to add a relatively inexpensive ethernet hub or switch. Q. What do you do when your computer doesn’t have available slots on the motherboard? A. If you have filled all of your slots, you can’t add any more cards. You might be able to add devices if they are USB devices and you have a USB connector and your level of the operating system supports USB. Further questioning uncovered some confusion--the questioner was unaware that unused slots have cover plates in the slot position to prevent electromagnetic interference (radio waves, etc.) from leaving the computer. Slot plates that don’t have a connector socket or jack on them are probably associated with an empty slot. Tthe only way to be sure is to open the machine. Q. Someone told me that I can run DSL and dial-up simultaneously. Is this true? A. Well, yes. The DSL connection is put on the same circuit as regular telephone service, and the regular telephone service still works. The regular telephones require a ‘filter’ that prevents the DSL data from reaching the regular telephones. And your dial-up connection can go over this regular telephone connection. However, I have found from experience that where the telephone circuit prior to DSL supported a v.90 modem at perhaps 50kbps, it now can only manage 26kbps. Still, this is probably sufficient for those times when you may still need a dial-up connection as with some banks, etc. Q. Is sound ever completely on the motherboard, completely in software, or only in the sound card? A. You need a sound-processing chip. It may be on a sound card, but the ‘sound card’ may actually be chips on the motherboard. These are most commonly on ‘integrated system’ motherboards where the sound and video are included on the motherboard. A tip-off is if the sound connectors come out of jacks on a board, or if they come out from the ‘case’. Q. I want to create a clean copy of my OS. Can I put my applications on another partition, load the OS, and have the applications run from there? A. The applications will only run if they have entries in the system registry for the OS. If you install a clean copy of the OS, then you don’t have any program entries in it. If you tell it to copy from the original OS’s registry, you will copy any ‘junk’ in that registry, defeating the purpose of the ‘clean’ install. If the system is working with the OS on, say, C:, and all of your applications are on, say, D: and you build a new install on a new partition, you will need to re-install your applications. However, you may "reinstall" to the same locations on D: again, so that you do not have two copies of the application stored on your hard disk. However, doing the installation will have the net effect of creating the required entries in your new OS’s system registry. Q. I want to move everything from a 4GB drive to a 30GB drive. What’s the best way? A. Included with the ‘retail’ packaging of many hard drives, such as Maxtor and Quantum, will be a utility diskette containing MaxBlast. This will clone the drive to a same-sized or large partition for you. Once done, change the jumper on the new drive from ‘slave’ to ‘master’ and use this drive as you master, and you are done. DriveCopy from PowerQuest will do that, and more. Q. The drive is actually a RAID array. A. Ignore the previous, you have to do it ‘the hard way’.