dacs.doc electric

Random Access
July 2003

Bruce Preston, 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. (AskDACS) I tried to install Windows XP on my computer, it didn't install properly, so we let it return to Windows Me. When it boots, it gives me a boot manager dialog, with the option of (1) Windows or (2) Windows Default with the highlight on Windows Default. If I let it time out it goes to Windows Default, which evidently is the pointer to the failed XP installation - that just resets the machine and brings me back to the boot manager screen. If I manually select the first option, then Windows Me starts up just fine. Is there a way to change the selection, or eliminate the boot manager entirely?

A. There is a file named BOOT.INI located in the root directory of your machine. It is hidden, read-only, and a system file. To get at it, you need to open a DOS command window (START / RUN / COMMAND ) (CMD for Windows NT, 2000, or XP) and run the ATTRIB command: C>attrib -r -s -h boot.ini You may then edit the boot.ini file - it is a plain text file. Delete the entire line for the item that you don't want (the second one, that says WINDOWS (Default). Save the file. From the command window, type C>attrib +r +s +h boot.ini Boot the machine. Since there is only one pointer it won't offer a choice, it will jump directly into the Windows Me loader.

Q. A friend has a medical information web-site, and when he uses a search engine to look for his site, it ends up at about position 30,000 out of 40,000. How does one get your site to rise to the top? I was told that putting invisible text of basic keywords, say 'hypertension' many times into the page would make it respond to a search on hypertension.

A. In the early days, the search engines crawled through sites looking for 'meta-tags' - embedded text in the site, and then looked at the words in the title, and then the words within the page. Putting dozens of copies of a word like 'hypertension' is known as keyword spamming, and the search engines became smart enough to recognize it. For a while, sites had a mechanism known as 'registering' where you could give the URL of a site to the search engine and request that it be analyized. Some search engines may still have this available. We have found that search engines now seem to be biased towards finding pages that other sites link into. For example, the DACS site frequently comes up on the first page of a search involving user groups. If you do this search on Google: link:www.dacs.org you will see that Google has found 164 (as of 7/21/03) links to our home page. The preface 'link:' before a URL is a special keyword to Google, that tells it to identify links into that site. There are packages and subscription services out there that offer to improve your rankings, but no one present had any experience with them. A search revealed this interesting site: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2168021 - you might want to examine it.

Q. I am looking for a digital camera. I won't say that price is not an issue. I have found a Kodak Easy Share 443 which uses a docking station. Reviews indicate that it has a problem with soft focus for distant stuff. Does any one have any experience with this, or recommendations?

A. No one was present with experience with that camera. Others liked Olympus and Canon. Some generalities are that you want to concentrate on the quality of the optical lens and optical zoom rather than digital zoom. Digital zoom only samples the center of the image capturing CCD, so you aren't getting the full megapixel quality when you use digital zoom. For what it is worth, on eBay, many love the Kodak family of cameras if they are doing macro close-ups, such as coins, stamps, etc. However, the same people say that for images of a large object, say a cabinet, they are disappointed.

Q. My computer runs Internet Explorer 5.5 and has last years Turbo Tax on it. Now, every time I ask for an internet connection there is a four to five minute delay before anything happens! What is going on?

A. While we can't prove it, we highly suspect that it is a side-effect of the Macrovision DRM (Digital Rights Management) layer (Safecast/C-Dilla) that got added to the machine as part of the Safecast/C-Dilla copy-protection package that was installed when you installed Turbo Tax. The delay sounds like a problem where it is not resolving the domain name lookup correctly, timing out, and then only after timing out is it realizing that it needs to establish your dial-up connection. Intuit took a real beating in the press and market place as a result of the problems introduced by their copy protection. This link: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Network/8814/cdillaremoval.html has detailed instructions on how to remove the DRM package. Note, however, that this will also disable Turbo Tax. The Intuit site: http://www.turbotaxsupport.com/servicesupport/ also has removal instructions. Note that uninstalling Turbo Tax of itself does not remove the DRM package. Intuit has announced that once the final filing date for 2002 taxes (October, 2003) has passed that they will publish a version of Turbo Tax 2002 that does not have the copy protection. They have also announced that they will not use the mechanism next year for pre-paid copies (retail or direct from Intuit) of Turbo Tax.

Q. I am running XP Pro - how do I differentiate between hybernate mode versus standby mode? I have scheduled activities that don't run - the schedule log says that the task did not run because the machine was not on, yet it was.

A. The schedule task will only run if there is a software timer associated with the scheduler running, which requires that the CPU is running. If your power management shuts down the machine, then the timers aren't running. The only thing that is running is the system time-of-day clock, which is not driven by the CPU. It does not have an alarm function. If your machine goes into standby or hibernate, then the only things that will wake it up are the power switch, wake-on-lan (WOL) on a network card if so equipped, wake-on-modem (WOM) on a modem if so equipped, and in some cases, a keyboard press or mouse movement. If your requirements are that a scheduled event take place then you must defeat certain (but not all) power management functions, such that the CPU keeps running so that it can run the timer(s).


Bruce Preston is president of West Mountain Systems, a consultancy in Ridgefield, CT, specializing in database applications. A DACS director and moderator of the Random Access segment at the monthly general meetings, Bruce also leads the Access SIG.

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