dacs.doc electric

Random Access
August 2002

Bruce Preseton, moderator

Members who are unable to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to "askdacs@aol.com" by the day prior to the meeting. We will attempt to get an answer for you. Please provide enough detail, as we will not be able to ask for additional information. Q. I have a DELL machine with an OEM U.S.Robotics X2 v.90 internal modem. I get good connections with my current equipment, but would really like to go to v.92.U.S. Robotics does not provide upgrade firmware for OEM modems--can anyone tell me where to get an upgrade? If not, what should I get? I also really want a modem with a controller rather than a WinModem, and would prefer an internal modem. I do not require voice capabilities. A. First, you are right in that a WinModem does not have a controller, so it will not run under all O/Ss or, for where it does run, without requiring the processor to perform a lot of communications work. Any v.92 external modem will have a controller. If you require an internal modem, the best ones are still U.S. Robotics. Q. My PC gets slower as the day goes on. How do I determine what is causing it to slow down, and how do I fix it? If I restart the machine, it works fine. I am running Windows 2000. A. What you describe is a classic case of memory leakage. An application obtains memory from the system (RAM) and then forgets to release it back to the system when it is finished. As a result, the system eventually runs out of RAM and has to make use of virtual memory on the disk, causing a performance problem. On Windows 2000 you can go to the performance monitor (Ctrl-Alt-Del) page before you start an application, and record the amount of available RAM. Then start and run one of your applications as normal. Then close the application and examine the available memory again--if it hasn't returned to where it was, you found the application with the memory leak. Follow-up questioning showed that you typically run PhotoShop, Notes, and Acrobat--all are complex programs, and all have had patch releases to repair memory leaks. Go to their respective sites and download the latest patches. Q. Whenever I print, even a plain document, I get a "Page Fault" error message. It provides an ‘Ignore' button, and if I click it, it prints the page properly, but ejects a blank page as well. The printer is an HP Inkjet 700. I am using Windows Me. A. Go to the HP website and make sure that you have the latest driver for the combination of printer and operating system. The printer drivers for Windows Me were very different from those of Windows 95 and Windows 98, and early drivers had problems. If you print a test page from the Printer / Properties page, it will list the version number of the printer drivers. Q. I am rebuilding a machine for a friend, and want to do a clean install of Windows 98 on it, using the WIndows 98 CD that came with the machine. However, when I boot with the bare hard drive which has no OS, I can't see the CD-ROM that holds the Windows 98 CD. It sounds like a chicken and egg problem. How do I get to the CD? A. Find another Windows 98 machine and create an "Emergency Recovery Diskette"--you will find it in the Control Panel as a page on Add/Remove Programs. This will create a bootable floppy which will contain the OAK CD driver, which is a very nice little generic CD ROM driver. With that you will be able to see the CD drive, and proceed from there.