dacs.doc electric

Random Access
February 2003

Bruce Preseton, moderator

Members who are unable to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to "askdacs@dacs.org" 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 Palm Pilot PDA and was told that it would be easy to move data between my Palm and Microsoft Outlook—but I can’t seem to find a way to do it. What’s the secret? A. When you install the Palm Pilot software from the CD that came with it, you have to tell it that you want to synchronize with MS Outlook, rather than the default Palm Desktop. Q. I have a handful of SDRAM boards that are marked 4Mx64—how much memory is that? There are no other markings that I can recognize as to possible memory indications. A. For your 4Mx64, since you need 8 bits for a data byte, you have to double the 4 to get 8, so you have to take half of the 64 to offset that. That means that you have 32MB on each of those SDRAM cards. Since you don’t have to put in pairs of SDRAM boards, the other way to tell, if you don’t mind opening up a machine, is to record the before-and-after memory with the boards installed in a machine. Q. I have tried to copy files from a “D:” partition on one XP machine to another XP machine, across the network. I get an error message:“Can not copy DOS files.” and a reference to CONFIG.NT. What is happening? The source machine at one time was running Windows 98SE and has been upgraded to XP. A. Dragging data should not matter at all. It sounds like you have grabbed a Windows XP system file that you shouldn’t copy or move, such as the contents of Documents and Settings —which are tightly bound to the hardware configuration. We suggest that you get the exact text of the message and do a search on Google to see if you can find an explanation. Another suggestion is to rename the CONFIG.NT files on each machine and then try doing the copy. Q. I recently heard that there is something going on with the current release of Turbo Tax. What is happening? A. Intuit added an activation/copy-protection scheme to Turbo Tax, that a lot of people are complaining about. It makes use of Macrovision’s SafeCast/C-Dilla which installs a hidden application to your machine, which encrypts your activation code and stores it, in fragments, in several places on your machine. Some people have reported problems with getting the activation key over the internet if they have dial-up networking; on Windows XP they get an API error—a crash during the install. Once Turbo Tax is installed, you only get one key when you ‘activate;’ after that, Turbo Tax will only run in a crippled mode (e.g. no printing, and perhaps some other disabled functions) if you try to install on another machine. If you uninstall Turbo Tax, C-Dilla is not removed. After many complaints that C-Dilla broke other applications and CD burning software, Intuit posted a removal tool that will remove C-Dilla - but it also completely disables Turbo Tax. If you replace your hard disk, you lose Turbo Tax capabilities, and they will not re-issue a key. This could be a serious problem, if for some reason you need to review your taxes at a later date. The internet boards are loaded with complaints about what Intuit has done -- do a Google search on “turbo tax 2002 macrovision c-dilla” to see what people are saying and writing. Most postings have a comment such as this: “After X years of using Turbo Tax, I have converted to Kipplinger’s Tax Cut and it works just fine.” Q. I have an Epson 1520 printer and am having printing problems. I’ve replaced the cartridges but it still doesn’t print correctly. What could be the problem? A. If the printer hasn’t been used for some time, you might have to run several head cleaning cycles to burn dried ink out of the printhead. This is found in the printer’s property pages on the Utility page—try running several cleaning cycles. Another common problem for some printer cartridges is that ink can get on the printed-circuit cards’ connectors and cause a problem—clean with a cotton swab moistened with rubbing alcohol. Q. I am now getting lots of pop-up windows, where I never saw them before. How do I get rid of them? A. Some sites send more than others—for example, personal web pages hosted on Yahoo! generate lots of pop-ups. There are pop-up killer add-on applications that can help. Disabling Java will do it also, but then you are likely to lose functionality on some web sites. For example, one of my clients found that he couldn’t book flights on Travelocity until he disabled the pop-up blocker. Q. I use Charter Communications, Periodically, I get a message out of the blue come up on my screen. This even happens when the machine is idle—I’m not surfing the internet. How do they do that, and how do I stop it? A. First, go to www.microsoft.com/security and obtain and run the “Baseline Security Analyzer.” It will see what openings you have on your machine. You may also want to get into your Control Panel/Services and disable MSMSGMGR (or similar) which is a component of Microsoft Instant Messenger - if you aren’t using IM, you don’t want this running. A firewall will also restrict who/what can reach into your machine -- software firewalls are adequate, but a hardware firewall such as found in a CableModem/DSL router/firewall will do much better. Check to see that it has SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection)—see this page: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/stateful_inspection.html for a description. Essentially, it keeps track of whether the connection was initiated by you from inside the firewall, or the attempt was made from outside the firewall and thus blocked. Note that firewalls can also watch for connection requests being made from your end—and will alert you to any applications that try to establish a link. You then decide whether to permit or decline. For example, it will trigger when your anti-virus software tries to go out and gather updates. In this case, you would want to approve the application as being ‘friendly’ or ‘trusted’ so that it can do the connection. On the other hand, you may want to manually control or outright block a request being made surreptitiously, after installing some product or an application you downloaded. Q. Is McAfee Spam Killer any good? A. The jury is still out on spam killers in general -- some of them generate many false positives. Unfortunately, if a false-positive blocks an important message, you are stuck. Some ISP’s use an ‘industrial grade’ spam detection/blocker system that makes use of servers such as the “Black Hole database”—to match emails against known spammers or spam-friendly ISPs. For example, Mags.Net reports that about 45% of the attempted deliveries into its POP3 mail server are bounced as spam—yet I have never gotten calls from clients or friends saying that their mail got bounced. When in doubt, they pre-pend “[Possible Spam]” to the message subject and let it through.