dacs.doc electric

Random Access

Instant Replay: January 1999

Bruce Preston, Moderator

Q. I installed Windows 98 and subsequently some other software. My printer has now disappeared. The printer device still shows as the default printer, and Windows doesn't complain when I boot. A. That the printer is visible in the folder but doesn't work points to a problem with the printer driver. There are several things that you can try. The easiest is to get into the BIOS setup and try pressing the PrtSc button. Most BIOS setup utilities will dump the screen to printer port LPT1. If you get anything at the printer, then you know that the printer, cable, and hardware are OK. If your Setup doesn=t support dumping characters to the printer port, then try to print from a plain DOS prompt. When you boot the machine, watch for the Starting Windows 98 message and immediately press F8. Select the Command Prompt Only option. Assuming your printer is on a parallel port, when you get the C:> prompt, type DIR *.* >LPT1:. This should cause a plain-text listing of your root directory to be listed on the printer. If you get Unknown Device, it means that the BIOS setting for your printer port has been lost. To fix that, boot the machine and go into the hardware setup-often by pressing DEL or F1 while the machine boots. Check that the printer port is enabled. If you get print, it means that the hardware (printer port, cable, printer) is OK. Assuming the printer responds to a plain-text dump from DOS, we now need to proceed to Windows. Boot the machine and let Windows start. Go to the START / SETTINGS / PRINTERS / <select your printer > / Right-Click and select PROPERTIES. From here, click on the PRINT TEST PAGE. If that works, then Windows sees the printer and, more importantly, sees the proper printer driver, in which case the problem is with your application software. The most likely thing is that somehow your printer driver within Windows got replaced or damaged. Here the best thing to do would be to use your Internet connection to visit the printer manufacturer's Website and download the latest printer driver. It will usually be a "self-extracting executable" file. Put the downloaded file in a folder called Printer Driver and then run it. This will put the driver file(s) and .INF file used by SETUP in the directory. Now go to the printer's property page (as above) and find the page that permits installation of a new driver. That should fix it. Other suggestions are to go to the Device Manager (Right-click My Computer, Properties, Device Manager) and make sure that you do not have any warning symbols (Yellow circle with a red "!"). If so, read the screens to identify and repair the conflict. If everything is OK, expand the PORTS section (click on the "+" sign) and select the LPT1 port. Click on REMOVE. Windows will warn you that you are removing the device. Then boot the machine, and Windows will detect the presence of the port and reinstall the port driver. (Note: The port driver is a separate piece of software from the printer driver. Data must pass through the printer driver and be passed on to the port driver to get to the printer cable and printer.) If all of this fails, you also might try borrowing another printer cable and printer to confirm that your printer port/cable/printer combinations are OK. Q. When I print under Windows 95 and ask for multiple copies, I only get one copy and must ask for another. The printer is an Epson 1100 series dot matrix printer. Another problem is that if I use the software from Peoples' Bank, my system locks up. A. First, see if there is a driver specific for your printer and install and check it, as above. Also, some printers/drivers offer the option of letting the hardware handle generating graphics, versus having Windows generate the graphics as it writes to the spool file. Q. Do any currently available PCs have a FireWire bus available? This is an ultra-high speed port different from the newly supported USB. A. No machines were identified as having the FireWire bus already installed, although several people said that they had adapters used for videoediting that worked. Q. From Office 95 I want to delete Access and PowerPoint. What is the proper way to do it? They don't show up individually on the Add/Remove Programs menu. A. The way NOT to do it is to use Windows Explorer and delete files. In the Microsoft Office 95 folder there should be a Microsoft Office Setup utility. If you run it, and it sees that Office 95 is already installed, it will realize that you might want to add or remove components. It will offer a menu where there are "Xs" showing what is currently installed. If you remove the Xs from Access and PowerPoint, it will remove the files used only by these components. Q. Does it remove the files, or just inactivate them? A. It will remove the program files and associated files that are used by the selected applications. It will not delete your data files, nor will it delete files (typically .dlls) that are "shared" by other applications. If there are any files in the directories created by Setup when it installed the application that weren't placed there by Setup, the directories will not be deleted. These files are usually your data files, although they could also be configuration/preferences files. Q. I received an e-mail file with the .MIM extension, and when I click on it, I get the message "White Board-Required Tasks Could Not Be Found-Please insure that the Net Meeting Tasks are running and try again." The sender is not using any white board application. The file is being delivered to me via AOL. A. There are probably two things that could be happening here. First, Microsoft Net Meeting was installed on your machine, and it has "grabbed" the .MIM extension as its own (via the mechanism of File Associations.) This is the mechanism that will start MS Word or WordPad if you click on a .doc file, and start WordPerfect if you have a .wpw file, etc. In your case, the association is pointing at Net Meeting. This will automatically be activated if you double click on a .MIM extension file. Your sender probably is just sending a file using the MIME conventions (most mail programs create .MIME files by default). The second (and more probable) thing is that you need to configure your AOL to decompress MIME files automatically when it delivers them. The AOL default setting is NOT to decompress them Q. I have an inexpensive surge protector power strip that has a little red light that now flickers. Does that mean that the thing is no longer working? A. The neon lamp used as a pilot lamp on most inexpensive surge protector power strips is only a power indicator and says nothing about whether the surge protection is working or not. For the most part, if a surge protector is asked to trap a massive power surge, the surge protector will "die" in the act, and no longer deliver power to its outlets. If in doubt, replace it. While you are about it, make sure that you have protection for your telephone line, since this is a very common path for electrical damage to computers. Q. Do you need a surge protector if you have a battery backup? Do you need battery backup? Is it true that as you get to higher generations of Windows (3.1, 95, 98, NT, etc.) that you need battery backup more? A. Ask yourself this question: If somebody were to turn off the machine while I was using it, would I suffer? If you are just playing games, then the only loss would be your possible high score. If you are working on a term paper or thesis, your accounts receivables, or your Great American Novel, then your loss might be much more. A battery backup will get you past those power blips that happen during storms and/or heat waves. The purpose of the battery backup is not to let you keep running for the duration of the storm, but to allow you time to close files and programs in an orderly fashion. Depending upon the size of the battery in the battery backup device and the power consumption of your system (which is determined by the number of drives, size of display, etc.), you may have anywhere from three to ten minutes. You should put your PC and the monitor on the battery backup. You should not put a printer (and especially never a laser printer) on battery backup, as they often draw more power than the computer and monitor combined. You can always restart a print request. The only reason people using the "higher level" Windows might feel they need a battery backup more is that frequently they have more applications running at a time, and thus more exposure to damage. An inexpensive battery backup system start at about $100, and is much preferable to a surge protector strip. Q. I have a Pentium 75-based machine with 8MB of RAM. I use it for surfing the Web and find it to be very slow. Sometimes I will get half of a document with a lot of graphics and only see portions of the image. I am running Windows 95 and Netscape 4.0, and have tried clearing the cache. The hard disk chatters while all of this is happening. A. Clearing the cache will sometimes help, as will defragging the drive immediately afterward to give you a contiguous swap space. The main problem and solution, however, is that you should probably add more memory to the machine. None of this will help if your hard disk is nearly full, since there isn't room for the graphics file and swap file and cache. Various members of the audience were incredulous that you were able to get both Windows 95 and Netscape 4.0 (or Internet Explorer 4.0, to be fair) to run with only 8MB of memory. Q. I have a 17-inch monitor that is about a year old. When I first turn on the display, the image is jittery. It settles down after a while. A. See if there is a degaussing button and try it. If you have speakers near the display, remember that the magnetic coil in the speaker is creating a magnetic field that is capable of distorting the displayed image. This usually manifests itself by making the side/corner of the display go "off color." Move the speakers away. Another audience member reported having a similar problem caused by a power control box under the display. Others reported sensitivity to having a laser printer on the same circuit (laser printers often have a timer that causes them to rotate the drum so that the rollers don't develop flat spots.) Other suggestions were seeing if there was a space heater on the same circuit.