dacs.doc electric

Random Access

Instant Replay: August 1998

Bruce Preston, Moderator

DACS MEMBERS who are unable to attend the monthly General Meeting may still pose questions to the group by submitting their questions to askdacs@aol.com by the night before the meeting. Q. I rebuilt my machine with a new hard disk and, as part of it, installed the trial version of McAfee's Virus Scan. Since then, the system has seriously slowed down. I want to remove it, but since it is software for Windows 3.11, it doesn't have an "uninstall" capability. What do I have to remove? A. Find references to Vshield in CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI and C:\WINDOWS\WIN.INI. You can comment out the lines by typing REM at the beginning of the lines that reference Vshield in .SYS and .BAT, and adding a semicolon (;) at the start of the .INI files. If there are multiple programs referenced in the RUN= or LOAD= lines in the .INI files, duplicate the whole line, place a semicolon (;) at the start of the original and then edit out the portion that references Vshield. This will leave other items active. With Windows 3.1x, you do not have to worry about the registry. You also might go to www.nai.com and check the FAQ area—or post the question on their Web site. Q. I upgraded my Netscape Navigator browser to 4.0 and have now lost the Adobe Acrobat reader as a plug-in. How do I get it to work again? A. If you reinstall the reader, it will detect that your default browser is now 4.0 and attach itself to Navigator 4.0. The current installation is only attached to your previous browser. When it installs, it will ask you which browser to attach to if you have more than one installed. Q. When I visit some sites on the Internet I get a message that says "Java script error." What is happening and how do I cure it? I am using Internet Explorer 4.0. A. Java script is a bit different from regular Java. Usually the page will continue if you respond to the question on the screen. You should consider getting the IE4 upgrade to 4.01 since it contains bug fixes and security patches; you should also get it if you are using Outlook Express. You can download the upgrade for free from Microsoft, or you can get it on a CD at a nominal cost. Go to the Microsoft Web site. Q. I have a Web site that is found by most search engines but is never "hit" by the Excite search engine. Is there something that I have to do for Excite to find it? A. More and more search engines are now only visiting and indexing a site if it has been "registered" by the site's Web master. You can do this by going to the search engine site and giving it the URL of your site. In addition, there are "meta tags" you may place in your Web page that indicate to some, not all, search engines which words are pertinent to your page and should be included in its index. Q. I have perhaps a thousand file entries in my Netscape cache. How do I get rid of them? (Note: this question is pertinent to Internet Explorer as well.) I can't seem to delete them from Windows Explorer. A. There are several ways of doing it. First, the browser itself usually has a button buried somewhere in the Options or Preferences screen that says "Erase the cache." You may use it. There are also commercial add-on utilities such as Quarterdeck's CleanSweep (the August presentation) or Cybermedia's Internet Guard Dog, both of which offer to clean the cache each time you disconnect from the Internet. Why would you not clean the cache? If you visit a site frequently, the browser will recognize the pages and graphics it has already "seen" and stored in the cache, and won't reload them via your dial-up connection the next time you reference the site. This is how using the "back" command operates so quickly. Within the browser configuration, you can set how much disk space you want to allocate to the cache; once you hit this limit, the files in the cache that have not been recently displayed will be deleted. Two reasons to delete the cache are 1) to save space on a system that is tight for disk storage, and 2) to establish privacy/security. Q. I have icons that "drift" about an inch or two in from the right edge of the screen. What causes this? A. You are probably normally running your display at a resolution of 800x600 (or higher). If you (or an application such as a game) change the application to the standard VGA resolution 640x480, the icons would be invisible, off the right edge or bottom of the screen. Windows moves them (perhaps stacking one on top of the other if there are many!) so that you can see them. Unfortunately, it does not put them back where they were when you (or the application) return to 800x600 setting. If you right-click on the desktop and select AutoArrange, they will all evenly position themselves along the left margin of the screen and thus will not be disturbed by screen resolution changes. Someone mentioned a utility that appeared in PC Magazine a few months ago that addresses this problem. you might check their Web site. Q. There is a service that for $100 will list/register your Web site with 800 search engines. They require a list of keywords that you want registered, but all of the words must be single words rather than phrases. Does this sound right? A. Usually registering with a search engine issues an invitation to the search engine to read the site and index the pages according to its own methodology. Some older engines might require that the keywords be identified by the Web master. The consensus is that this requirement by the service might be to support the older engines. If the engine isn't smart enough to read the contents of the page, then it probably isn't going to be able to handle multiword keywords. You might put the multiword phrases into meta tags in the page header(s). Q. What is the story with the security problem with e-mail and long attachment filenames? A. If the filename is longer than about 255 characters, it appears that it will permit an application referenced in an HTML page to be executed without alerting the user. This problem has been addressed by the browser publishers. There are no known instances of this happening other than in "the lab". Check the www.nai.com Web site for more information. (Webmasters note: Additional information about this and other security problems can found at http://www.ciac.org). Q. What are Internet cookies? A. A cookie is a text file that is not dangerous and cannot do anything destructive. It is used by Web sites to store "state" information for the next time you visit the site (which may be as simple as going to the next page). For example, a search engine may place an encoded reference to the results of your search so that when you say "show me the next ten hits" it knows which temporary file on the search engine's disk to read from. If you have ever used a site that has "add to shopping cart," the codes identifying your product choices are stored in a cookie. The cookie usually has an "expiration date," although many sites put ridiculously long lifetimes on their cookies. You can disable cookies in the browser, but for some sites, if you disable the cookies then you can't always make use of the capabilities of the site. Follow-up item: We always like to hear that a problem was resolved via Random Access. In the previous session, several members had problems with the paper-feed mechanism in their HP DeskJet printers. Upon our suggestion, one of them found a page on the HP Web site (http://www.hp.com/cposupport/printers/support_doc/bpd02223.html) that listed a large number of printers manufactured between June 1993 and March 1994 whose rollers were made with a rubber that tended to "glaze" and not move the paper. HP has a free repair tool, which they will send upon request, that is placed into the paper-feed area. A supplied utility program is then used to make the rollers turn for about 15 minutes. The tool has a mild abrasive surface (similar to a Scotch-Brite scouring pad), which will remove the glazed surface from the rubber rollers, restoring functionality. If you have an HP DeskJet 510, DeskWriter 510, DeskJet 520, DeskWriter 520, DeskJet 550C or DeskJet 560C printer, be sure to visit the site to determine if your printer is likely to require the kit.