dacs.doc electric

Random Access
February 2002

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. (AskDACS) Is there any place that I can go to report SPAM? I have gotten eleven e-mails from the same place, all of which contained a virus. A. Go to the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE) at www.cauce.org In addition, a group called the Spam Recycling Center has a program in place to lobby for anti-spam legislation--visit their site www.spamrecycle.com Q. (AskDACS) Could you describe the differences between SDRAM and RDRAM? A. RDRAM is also called "Rambus." It costs more, but can make use of a front-side bus rate on the order of 1GHz as compared to the more common 133MHz or 266MHz rates. The technology is described by the inventor--www.rambus.com and is being recommended for use with Pentium IV processors with Rambus capable motherboards. Take a look at this page: www.rambus.com/technology/February 2002 techno logy_overview.html. Q. I was poking around in my Aptiva with PC Doctor in my Windows 98 machine and came upon an entry Disk Cache Size=64KB, and a subsequent line: Disk Cache Not Installed. This sounds like something that I would want. How would I enable it? A. With an IDE drive, the cache is already present in the drive. PC Doctor is reporting the cache that would have been used if you had an old ESDI or earlier drive. The other place that a disk cache might be used is if you have a large hard drive but with a BIOS that does not recognize the large drive. In that case, you need a DDO (Disk Drive Overlay) which adjusts the BIOS, and would also require a drive cache. Your machine is of an era that would not require DDO. In short, leave it alone. Q. I ran a disk defrag on a fairly new Windows XP machine and found a number of files that could not be defragged or moved. Is this a problem? A. No. You can not defrag a file that is open. A few system files that are fragmented are not going to be a problem. If you can hear the drive head rattling on your machine, then you have a problem. It is important to keep the number of temporary files down, etc., as these can impact the responsiveness of your machine. Q. On the topic of temporary files, how do you know if you can delete them? A. Here is a simple guideline: By definition, any file that is in \TEMP, or \TMP, or \WINDOWS\TEMP, etc., is fair game for deletion if its creation date and time is earlier than the last time that you booted the machine. The contents of \Temporary Internet Files (which may be in any of several locations on your machine, depending upon which release of Windows you are running). These files are also called ‘the cache’ and consist of such things as images for the logos, icons, buttons, etc. that are/were on web pages that you visited. If you return to a page that you have visited before, the browser will usually download the page, and then as it finds references to objects (logos, images, etc.) it checks the cache first before it reaches out through the internet to gather them again. This will make your browsing faster up to a certain point. At some point it becomes slower to search through all of the files in the cache to see if the file exists locally than it would take to just go get it from the internet. Depending upon how much you surf the internet, and whether you return to the same page(s) a lot, you may want to consider establishing a frequency at which you periodically clear the cache. Q. How do you go about clearing the cache? A. In Internet Explorer, go to TOOLS then INTERNET OPTIONS... and then in the middle (Temporary Internet Files) of the GENERAL page, click on the "Delete Files" button. In Netscape Navigator, go to EDIT then PREFERENCES. Expand the ‘Advanced’ item in the bottom of the list to get the button for clearing the disk cache. Q. In Windows Excel is there a way to print a spreadsheet so that by default it does not print headers and footers? A. It is not in the Page Setup as one would assume. Rather, take a look at the topic--templates, customizing workbook defaults--in Excel Help. Q. I just upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows XP. Now the top of the dsiplayable area of my monitor is no longer visible. Why did this happen, and how do I fix it? A. Windows XP has more sophisticated hardware recognition and newer drivers. It probably identified your display adapter and monitor and set default settings for the combination. However, these assume that the 'dials' on the display are at or close to factory settings. If your monitor is fairly recent, it probably has on-screen digital display adjustments—the use of several buttons under the screen that are used to work through menus that control horizontal and vertical size and centering, pincushion--the image is wider (or narrower) in the middle than at the top of bottom, etc. Use these to make the adjustment. Q. My machine is not connected to a LAN --but when I start it up, it insists upon asking for a password. How do I get rid of this? It is Windows 98. A. Do a START/SEARCH/FILES and FOLDERS and look for files with the extension of .PWL. These are password-list-files. Delete them. Restart the machine. It will ask you for the password for the most recent username that you used. Do not fill in a password, and do not click the ‘X’ box to close the dialog box. Instead, just click OK with an empty password field. You may be asked to confirm that there is an empty password--do so. You will not be prompted for a logon again. Q. Under certain circumstances, I get a web page and while at the page, the browser just locks up--the mouse won't do anything on the page--yet other windows and applications are responsive. The browser is Netscape. A. Some releases of Netscape Navigator had a severe memory leak. Use the Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to get to the application and end it. Note that Netscape Navigator is considerably less tolerant of malformed web pages. For example, if a table does not have a data cell closed, with the /TD tag, or a row closed, with the /TR tag, then the page will cease loading at the start of the table and lock the page. So it is possible that the page, while viewable in Internet Explorer, may not be viewable in Netscape. We have also observed problems (with any browser) with pop-up windows from pages (such as Yahoo personal pages) that come up behind the current window and expect some sort of input--thus taking focus away from the viewable page. The browser will not accept input for the page, because it thinks that the pop-up is expecting data. Sometimes there is a hint that this is the case if the popup created an icon on the taskbar. Q. I have Windows 2000 on C and programs on D. Drive C is full. Can I move existing programs from C in the "Program Files" folder to D. Can I move these files? A. You can’t just copy the files. When you install an application, part of the installation process is to write to the Windows Registry where it put the support components for the applications--things such as the support .DLL files, things such as spelling checker files, help files, etc. If you move the application with a plain copy, it will not correct the registery entries. This is ONLY done programatically--either via doing an uninstall followed by install, or by using a specialized application such as "AppMover" which I believe came with various things such as Iomega drivers, and Partition Magic, etc. Q. Can the CMOS battery on a laptop machine be replaced? A. Yes, if the manufacturer put it in a socket. If not, then it was probably surface-mounted and soldered to the motherboard, in which case it is not a user-replaceable task. Most notebooks that I have seen have the battery soldered in. They are usually trickle charged so that they do not require replacement. Q. I want to grab a portion of the screen to use for documentation and training. How do I get just part of the screen? A. Some applications will recognize Control-PrtSc or Alt-PrtSc and only save the ‘current’ window to the clipboard. Just plain PrtSc will save the entire screen. Either way, you may then use any photo-editor to crop out just the portion of the screen that you want. For screen dumps for documentation, I would then recommend that you save the file as type .GIF as it will give you a cleaner, compressed image. If you are going to be doing a lot of this, then take a look at this application: PrintKey Pro: www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/3053/ Q. My ISP drops the connection if I don’t send commands fairly often. This can be a problem if I am doing a download of a large file. Someone suggested going to any site that broadcasts a radio station to keep the connection alive--would this do it? A. That is a terrible way of doing it, as the radio data will be in competition with your download data. A much better solution is to first make sure that your dial-up networking connection doesn't have the 'disconnect after x minutes of inactivity' setting active, and if that isn't the case, then set your email to check for new messages every, say, 5 minutes. Also set it so that it only checks if you are online. This will cause a very brief 'send' message to your post office inquiring as to the presence of new mail--with a corresponding short response—but it should be enough to keep the connection alive.