dacs.doc electric

Random Access
January 2001

Jim Scheef, moderator

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 an IBM Aptiva with Windows 98. The CD ROM drive has failed. I purchased a new CD ROM at a computer show, is there anything special that I have to do to replace the drive? A. It is unlikely that there are any special drivers for a plain CD ROM drive (There may be special drivers for a CD R/W). It would be prudent to go into the Windows Device Manager ( Start / Settings / Control Panel / System ) then Device Manager - then click the "+" next to CD ROM drives, select the drive and click REMOVE. This will remove any drivers. Then shutdown the computer. Remove the drive, and make note of which connector on which ribbon cable is being used by the existing drive. After you have removed the drive, make note of the Master/Slave jumper setting. It is usually a small jumper block, and is usually labeled MS for Master, SL for Slave, or (rarely) CS for Cable Select. You need to have the same setting on the CD ROM drive. It you have a hard disk on the same ribbon cable, it is probably set as Master and the CD ROM drive would be Slave. If the CD ROM was on a completely different cable (which means a different IDE controller) then it probably is set as a Master. For any IDE cable, you must have a Master device before you have a Slave - you may only have one Master and one Slave on a controller. Make sure that the connector is oriented correctly - the edge of the cable that is painted red is the #1 pin edge. There will be an indication (either a ‘1' or a small molded ‘V') near the connector on the drive. The 1 pin is usually adjacent to the power connector. Plug the cables in—power, ribbon data cable, and the audio cable that goes to your sound card. When you boot the machine, Windows should find the drive and you will be back in business. Q. I have a Pentium II 400MHz. I am told that I can get an upgrade processor from AMD that would take it to 1GHz. The processor is a "Slot 1" processor—what does that mean? Can I just plug it in? A. It depends upon the motherboard. If the board can only handle a processor clock speed of, say 500MHz, then putting in a 1GHz processor isn't going to help. Additionally, there are jumpers on the board that may have to be changed so as to provide the correct voltage for the processor. Newer motherboards can auto-configure, they are marked as being ‘jumperless'. You will need to find the manual for the existing motherboard to see what it can handle. If you can't find the manual, the information should be available on the web. As for "Slot 1" this means that the processor is on a board that is mounted perpendicular to the motherboard, using two large ‘clips' that lock it and the sandwiched heat-sink/cooling fan in place. Prior to this, most processors were mounted in a socket that was surface mounted on the motherboard. Many in the room felt that you would not really see a lot of difference between a 400MHz P-II and a 1GHz processor unless you also increased the speed of your system bus, video card and hard disk - in other words the other components would essentially sandbag the faster processor. The general advice was to first make sure that you have lots of RAM, and then look into a faster video subsystem. To get the faster bus speed etc., you would need a faster motherboard. Q. My PC is running Windows 98 and won't shutdown. It does blank out the screen, but it doesn't ever give me the "It is safe to turn off your machine" message, nor is it turning off the machine. Any suggestions? A. Windows 98 has known problems - there is a Knowledge Database article that is about 20 pages long that has all of the things that can be done to get it to shutdown the system. Some of the suggested items have to do with APM - turn off any "Power Management" settings in the control panel, and also go into the BIOS SETUP and see how the power management settings are set. Typical problems are that Windows has settings that imply that you have a notebook machine that needs battery conservation. Go to www.microsoft. com and select SUPPORT then KNOWLEDGE BASE, and do a search on the two words SHUTDOWN and POWER. One of the several articles that might be pertinent is "Problems Shutting Down Windows 98 Second Edition (Q238096)"—there are other articles for other releases of Windows. Q. Several times a month I get a message from QuickBooks that says that there is an update. How do they know that there is an update? A. Several Intuit products run a program ‘Qagent' which periodically checks, via the internet, to see if there are updates. If it finds them, it downloads them in the background, and then notifies you that it has updates. It is supposed to be invisible. If you don't want it, there is an option within the configuration for the Intuit product that can be used to tell it to not look for updates. In addition, utilities such as StartStop can be used to block the feature. By the way, similar capabilities are often found in anti-virus software, as well as with newer versions of Microsoft operating systems. Q. I have an HP printer (parallel interface) which I share with another machine. If I unplug the printer to use on the other machine, I can not plug it back into the first machine and have it available without booting. Before upgrading my O/S to Windows Me I could do this. Can I fix this? A. Parallel printer devices are not supposed to be ‘hot swappable'. If you had been able to do it with the previous O/S you were lucky. The newer O/S's are much ‘pickier' - they are also more robust because they don't let you do such things. One thing that you should do is see if there is a newer driver available from the printer vendor. Q. I upgraded my web browser to Internet Explorer 6 on my Windows 95 machine. Now when I try to get to a site, I get an error message from "Content Advisor" that requests my supervisor password. I don't have a supervisor password. What is all of this? A. You have a damaged installation. Re-install. Also, you might need to set the "Security Zone" value to a more permissive setting. Q. Is there a way to move recordings on an audio cassette to a CD? A. Yes. You can do it with several applications, such as Music Match. The sequence is that you bring the data in via line input into your sound card and create a .WAV file. You can then convert it to CD audio with an audio application such as Music Match, and then copy the audio file to the CD with CD burner software such as EZ CD Creator. Q. I replaced the sound card on my HP machine running Windows 2000 Pro. It is still very scratchy. Any suggestions? A. Check the compatibility list at the HP site - they have some problems with some devices. Q. My Epson 1520 high-res printer prints about ½ of a PageMaker image - the page starts to print just fine, and then ejects the page and starts printing garbage. What is happening? A. Check that you have the latest driver. You might want to see if you can change the printer from EMF to RAW mode - this controls which device does much of the work. See if changing the image file type from TIFF to some other format. Did you install some other software that might have hammered a driver? For large images, you need a lot of temporary storage—do you have a lot of space on the C: drive? Q. I overheard a sales person ask a customer who was purchasing a new machine with MS Windows XP on it if the customer had a new printer. He said that XP has problems with older printers. Does this make sense? A. Yes - Microsoft has been writing its own drivers lately or making it hard for hardware manufacturers to write drivers. As a result, the drivers supplied by Microsoft may not have all of the functionality that had been available in prior releases. (However, the drivers are also less likely to crash the system.) As a result, it is a problem to find drivers for older printer devces.