dacs.doc electric

Random Access
March 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 am looking at an external hard disk for a laptop computer—USB 2.0 interface. There are two models, 4,000 RPM and 7,000 RPM available. Is 7,000 RPM going to be that much faster? A. The speed of the USB interface will probably throttle down the USB such that You won’t see much difference between the two drives. If the Interface were Firewire, then that would move data faster. Q. I am going to be painting my house this summer, and am wondering if I could use a photo editing program to visualize what the house would look like if I were to scan the various color chips that I am considering. A. You could, as many programs have a ‘color replacer’ capability. However you will not preserve the gradations of color due to shadow, or differences between Direct sun reflection etc. As a result, the image will look somewhat ‘flat’. But you may find it to be an interesting exercise. Q. I have a re-writable CD. It burns music just fine, but I can not burn data. Any suggestions? A. If you are using Direct-CD or “Drive Letter Access” for data, then the media must first be formatted if you intend to make use of the re-writable capability of the drive and the media. (It takes about 45 minutes per CD) With the cost of plain CD-R media about 1/20th the cost of CD-RW, many find it more cost effective to just burn data onto the CD and not “close the session”—which lets you append additional data to the CD until it is full. Once the CD is full, you either keep it or throw it away— but you can’t re-write it. To burn a data CD, you would use the same software as you use to burn the music CDs, just tell it is data. (Example: Roxio EZ-CD Creator, Nero, etc.) Q. When I installed SNET-Yahoo! DSL, it installed their own browser. When it did so, it brought in my bookmarks that had been in IE. Now when I use IE, my book marks are gone. How do I get them back? A. In IE (6, maybe earlier) try FILE then IMPORT/EXPORT. This will start a wizard which will offer to bring in Favorites and Cookies. By the way, Netscape saves them in the folder for the current user (\Program Files\Netscape\Users\username\bookmark.htm). Newer versions of Netscape use the .HTML extension. Q. Has anyone had problems with DVDs from Netflicks disappearing upon return to Netflicks? A. One or two others attending the meeting reported that they had lost DVDs that went through the Flushing, New York clearing house. A search on the web showed that best practice is to contact Netficks’ Customer Service and follow up by filing with the post office. Q. When I try to download Turbo Tax State my ISP times-out. What can I do? A. Some ISP dial-up services will time-out if they don’t see activity from your end. You may have to browse to a web-site during the download - the clicks will keep the connection alive. Take a look in the properties page for the dial-up connection and make sure that there isn’t a ‘disconnect after inactivity’ setting. Moving the mouse does not send a data packet, you have to send data through the connection. Q. My wireless connection drops every day between 3PM and 4PM. Any suggestions? A. No one could come up with a specific reason, however it was suggested that you set up the wireless networking with static IP addresses asigned to your machine(s) and not run the DHCP server - such that traffic ‘passing by’ can’t tap into your network. If you have the other security/encryption capabilities in your network, activate them. Q. I have a Dell machine, about 2 years old. There is some software that I want to run that would like faster video with more color depth than the current Intel Integrated Graphics that is on the motherboard. Can I put in a video card and disable the Intel Integrated Graphics? A. It depends upon whether the mother-board and/or BIOS settings permit it. It also depends upon whether you have a slot available of the appropriate type—or example, most high-end graphics cards are AGP— they require an AGP slot, which might not be present on your motherboard. Q. My machine hangs when I boot Windows 98. It may take 15 minutes or so before it finally boots. (Upon asking we found that:) I am running McAfee anti-virus. A. Older versions of McAfee runs a DOS-environment scan of your hard disk when you boot. The DOS environment does not provide enough memory for the scanning engine to hold all of the virus signatures, so it has to do two passes! If you have a large hard disk, this can take a long time. The thing to do is to disable the execution of the scan-on-boot, as you still have real-time protection which identifies infected files are they are introduced to your machine (via e-mail, download, etc.) You do this by editing the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on your machine and commenting out the line that has the SCAN program.