dacs.doc electric

Random Access

Instant Replay: March 1999

Bruce Preston, Moderator

DACS members who are unable to attend the general meetings are invited to submit their questions to askdacs@aol.com at least 24 hours prior to the Meeting. We will submit the questions to the membership and post the answers in the next dacs.doc.

AskDACS: We are interested in purchasing a voice recognition program and were wondering if there was anyone in the club who has used one. We are particularly interested in Dragon Naturally Speaking. Any suggestions, recommendations, or words of wisdom would be helpful.

A. Of those who are currently using voice recognition software, the distribution was about even between Dragon's Naturally Speaking and IBM's Via Voice. There was general agreement that you must have a quality noise-canceling microphone, perhaps on a headset. The other comment was that the "Lite" version of Via Voice that comes bundled with Lotus SmartSuite will work only with the SmartSuite products and cannot be used for controlling other Windows applications or Windows itself.

AskDACS: I need a program that will let me control a mailing list the way that I want to do it. I need additional fields for sorting and selection purposes. The mailing list capability that is in Word is too limiting. I have MS Home Essentials and Excel.

A. Several suggestions: a) Define your own columns in Excel. You may then sort and select as you wish. Having made the selections, export the data to Word for printing; b) look at the use of tables within Word; and c) Lotus Organizer has many capabilities and is said to be available at Office Depot for $9.95.

AskDACS: The DACS Internet SIG would like to know what is next in connection technology, and what is currently available in the region.

A. ISDN is currently available in SNET service areas and NY Telephone areas, although it is rather costly. Cable Modem technology is now being offered in several areas for about $39/month, including cable modem rental. Members in Monroe, Redding, and Brewster reported having the service. The type of service depends on the state of the cable provider's system: Some earlier implementers use one-way cable modems, which require a regular telephone connection for sending commands to the ISP (e.g. URL requests, or uploads of e-mail messages). Others have two-way communication.

B. According to Motorola, which has shipped about 70% of the installed base for Cable Modems, their CableSURFR modem provides a nominal 10 mbps download and 768 kbps upstream connection. Visit www.mot.com/MIMS/multimedia/ for more information. Another new technology, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), is not available in the immediate area, although there is now advertising that "Red" (from RedConnect, www.redconnect.com) is available in New York City. See www.nortelnetworks.com/pcn/1megmodem/intro/home.html for a description. It claims that the service level will not degrade as more users are added to the network, a concern for cable modem installations, since there is an upper limit of about 30 mbps bandwidth available on an individual cable segment (you and your neighbors). DSL boasts 1.3 mbps download and 320 kbps upstream.

AskDACS: I recently installed "RealPlayer" and am now experiencing a freeze of my system requiring a reboot, followed by ScanDisk. According to Task Manager (made visible by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del), I have approximately 16 applications or services running. I am running Windows 95 on a PII-300 with 64MB of RAM, a 56K modem, and Netscape 3.0. Tech Support at Real.Com says that I have to eliminate about 12 applications to free up memory. How do I get rid of them?

A. First, make sure you are running the latest release of RealPlayer, available for download from www.realplayer.com. Having said that, a lot depends upon what those 16 applications are. If they are applications such as PhotoShop, AutoCAD, etc. which are very resource intensive, then perhaps you should unload them when you are surfing the Web. However, there are a lot of applications that show up in the taskbar that are not likely to be causing a problem, such as: printer spool manager, QuickRes, Nprotect, etc., which control your printer, screen resolution, anti-virus, etc. Some may be required while you are running Netscape or Internet Explorer, such as RNAAPP (your Remote Network Adapter, which provides you with PPP support while you are connected to the Internet).

One thing to do is to take inventory of your applications before you connect to the Internet. At that time, the only application that you really must have running is Explorer, which is the Windows shell. Note that this is not the same as Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer. All of the others were probably started from one of several places: the Start Up folder, which is in Windows\Start Menu\Programs and is the normal place for user-elected startup applications. Common things you will find there are MS Office Fast Start (which starts helper libraries so that MS Office applications start faster), MS Find Fast (which indexes MS Office documents so that you can search them by content or keyword), etc. If you are not a heavy user of MS Office products, these shortcuts in the Start Up folder may (should?) be deleted. Note that deleting the shortcut does not delete the application, just the launch of the application. Other places that can launch applications are the RUN= and LOAD= lines in \WINDOWS\WIN.INI (commonly used by Windows 3.x applications), and in the Windows Registry at these subkeys of \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\
subkey: Run
subkey: RunService
subkey: RunOnce
subkey: RunServiceOnce
The latter two are normally used only by an installation program that requires the setup be continued after an intervening boot so that new DLLs or device drivers may be loaded before the setup continues. However, if there is a problem with completing the installation, the keys may have not been deleted. Lastly, the consensus at the meeting was that you shouldn't have a problem running RealPlayer on a machine with 64MB.

Q. I have a Compaq Presario 4508 with 48MB of RAM. Maybe one time out of five, when the machine goes into Suspend mode, if I wake the machine the mouse is frozen. The only way to get the machine operable is to reboot the machine.

A. Some have seen this behavior if the energy-saving feature in the ROM BIOS as well as the energy-saving features in Windows 9x are enabled. What can happen is that the hardware wake-up call is consumed and not passed on to the software, or visa versa. Our suggestion is to get into the ROM BIOS Setup and disable the power-saving features there and just use the capabilities from within Windows 9x.

Q. I have a CTX laptop 700 Series with Windows 95. It doesn't recognize PC Cards (formerly called PCMCIA cards) inserted into the PC card slot.

A. Make sure that the "Socket Services" have been installed. If you didn't have the machine configured to support Socket Services when you purchased the machine (perhaps because you didn't order a PC Card at the time), they may not have been installed. You can see if they are installed if you see a PC Card applet in Control Panel. You should have received a diskette containing socket services software; if so, install it. You can also try to install from Add New Hardware: Bypass the automatic search, and select PCMCIA Socket. If the applet is present, open it and see if perhaps it had been set to "deactivate," which might have been done if you didn't have a need for PC Card support when the machine was built.

Q. When I install a new application in my IBM should I use the Aptiva install application utility, or the Windows Add/Remove Software application. I want to be able to properly uninstall the application if I don't like it.

A. Both of these mechanisms ultimately start the software installation utility specific to the application. For the large majority of applications, this means they will use an application from InstallShield called SETUP to actually perform the installation. This utility is responsible for creating the registration entries needed for deinstallation, and for leaving the .ISU file used to perform the uninstall. A comment: When you uninstall an application, the uninstaller will only remove those portions of the application that it put on the machine. There are three types of files to consider: a) files (and directories) placed by SETUP during installation into the application's directory, b) files placed by SETUP in a shared location such as WINDOWS\SYSTEM, and c) files created by the user. Files in category "a" will be removed. Files in category "b" might be removed, but if there is a possibility that they are also used by other applications, they will be left on the machine. If SETUP finds a shared component already in place, it bumps a "usage" counter to reflect that more than one application is using the component. Files in category "c" will never be removed. This later situation will often result in the directories/folders not being removed, with a consequent message that "uninstall was not able to remove" some files.

Q. Does anyone use a laptop with Sprint PCS or other cellular service?

A. A representative from Danbury Hospital says that they use it for some of their dial-up capabilities, and it works fine.

Q. I have a new Aptiva and it gets corrupted. Specifically, it keeps finding multiple copies of the same device, installing them, and then complaining about it. For example, it reports that I have two mice, two sound cards, etc. If I delete them, they come back the next time I boot.

A. We have seen this when Windows detects a device, installs a device driver but then, as part of the installation, asks for the diskette or CD from the manufacturer. The subsequent driver process then sets up an installation run for the next boot, and you end up loading the device driver again. The recommended process was to start the machine in SAFE MODE, then delete the device. Then shut down the machine and cold-boot it. When it finds new hardware, tell it to NOT install the device. Then go into the manual installation SETUP process on the diskette or CD provided by the manufacturer. This will prevent an incomplete and redundant install by making sure that there is only one request for the device in the registry at "\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce"

Random Access

Instant Replay: March 1999

*Bruce Preston, Moderator*
DACS members who are unable to attend the general meetings are invited to submit their questions to askdacs@aol.com at least 24 hours prior to the Meeting. We will submit the questions to the membership and post the answers in the next dacs.doc. *AskDACS:* We are interested in purchasing a voice recognition program and were wondering if there was anyone in the club who has used one. We are particularly interested in Dragon Naturally Speaking. Any suggestions, recommendations, or words of wisdom would be helpful. A. Of those who are currently using voice recognition software, the distribution was about even between Dragon's Naturally Speaking and IBM's Via Voice. There was general agreement that you must have a quality noise-canceling microphone, perhaps on a headset. The other comment was that the "Lite" version of Via Voice that comes bundled with Lotus SmartSuite will work only with the SmartSuite products and cannot be used for controlling other Windows applications or Windows itself. *AskDACS:* I need a program that will let me control a mailing list the way that I want to do it. I need additional fields for sorting and selection purposes. The mailing list capability that is in Word is too limiting. I have MS Home Essentials and Excel. A. Several suggestions: a) Define your own columns in Excel. You may then sort and select as you wish. Having made the selections, export the data to Word for printing; b) look at the use of tables within Word; and c) Lotus Organizer has many capabilities and is said to be available at Office Depot for $9.95. *AskDACS:* The DACS Internet SIG would like to know what is next in connection technology, and what is currently available in the region. A. ISDN is currently available in SNET service areas and NY Telephone areas, although it is rather costly. Cable Modem technology is now being offered in several areas for about $39/month, including cable modem rental. Members in Monroe, Redding, and Brewster reported having the service. The type of service depends on the state of the cable provider's system: Some earlier implementers use one-way cable modems, which require a regular telephone connection for sending commands to the ISP (e.g. URL requests, or uploads of e-mail messages). Others have two-way communication. B. According to Motorola, which has shipped about 70% of the installed base for Cable Modems, their CableSURFR modem provides a nominal 10 mbps download and 768 kbps upstream connection. Visit www.mot.com/MIMS/multimedia/ for more information. Another new technology, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), is not available in the immediate area, although there is now advertising that "Red" (from RedConnect, www.redconnect.com) is available in New York City. See www.nortelnetworks.com/pcn/1megmodem/intro/home.html for a description. It claims that the service level will not degrade as more users are added to the network, a concern for cable modem installations, since there is an upper limit of about 30 mbps bandwidth available on an individual cable segment (you and your neighbors). DSL boasts 1.3 mbps download and 320 kbps upstream. *AskDACS:* I recently installed "RealPlayer" and am now experiencing a freeze of my system requiring a reboot, followed by ScanDisk. According to Task Manager (made visible by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del), I have approximately 16 applications or services running. I am running Windows 95 on a PII-300 with 64MB of RAM, a 56K modem, and Netscape 3.0. Tech Support at Real.Com says that I have to eliminate about 12 applications to free up memory. How do I get rid of them? A. First, make sure you are running the latest release of RealPlayer, available for download from www.realplayer.com. Having said that, a lot depends upon what those 16 applications are. If they are applications such as PhotoShop, AutoCAD, etc. which are very resource intensive, then perhaps you should unload them when you are surfing the Web. However, there are a lot of applications that show up in the taskbar that are not likely to be causing a problem, such as: printer spool manager, QuickRes, Nprotect, etc., which control your printer, screen resolution, anti-virus, etc. Some may be required while you are running Netscape or Internet Explorer, such as RNAAPP (your Remote Network Adapter, which provides you with PPP support while you are connected to the Internet). One thing to do is to take inventory of your applications before you connect to the Internet. At that time, the only application that you really must have running is Explorer, which is the Windows shell. Note that this is not the same as Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer. All of the others were probably started from one of several places: the Start Up folder, which is in Windows\Start Menu\Programs and is the normal place for user-elected startup applications. Common things you will find there are MS Office Fast Start (which starts helper libraries so that MS Office applications start faster), MS Find Fast (which indexes MS Office documents so that you can search them by content or keyword), etc. If you are not a heavy user of MS Office products, these shortcuts in the Start Up folder may (should?) be deleted. Note that deleting the shortcut does not delete the application, just the launch of the application. Other places that can launch applications are the RUN= and LOAD= lines in \WINDOWS\WIN.INI (commonly used by Windows 3.x applications), and in the Windows Registry at these subkeys of \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ subkey: Run subkey: RunService subkey: RunOnce subkey: RunServiceOnce The latter two are normally used only by an installation program that requires the setup be continued after an intervening boot so that new DLLs or device drivers may be loaded before the setup continues. However, if there is a problem with completing the installation, the keys may have not been deleted. Lastly, the consensus at the meeting was that you shouldn't have a problem running RealPlayer on a machine with 64MB. Q. I have a Compaq Presario 4508 with 48MB of RAM. Maybe one time out of five, when the machine goes into Suspend mode, if I wake the machine the mouse is frozen. The only way to get the machine operable is to reboot the machine. A. Some have seen this behavior if the energy-saving feature in the ROM BIOS as well as the energy-saving features in Windows 9x are enabled. What can happen is that the hardware wake-up call is consumed and not passed on to the software, or visa versa. Our suggestion is to get into the ROM BIOS Setup and disable the power-saving features there and just use the capabilities from within Windows 9x. Q. I have a CTX laptop 700 Series with Windows 95. It doesn't recognize PC Cards (formerly called PCMCIA cards) inserted into the PC card slot. A. Make sure that the "Socket Services" have been installed. If you didn't have the machine configured to support Socket Services when you purchased the machine (perhaps because you didn't order a PC Card at the time), they may not have been installed. You can see if they are installed if you see a PC Card applet in Control Panel. You should have received a diskette containing socket services software; if so, install it. You can also try to install from Add New Hardware: Bypass the automatic search, and select PCMCIA Socket. If the applet is present, open it and see if perhaps it had been set to "deactivate," which might have been done if you didn't have a need for PC Card support when the machine was built. Q. When I install a new application in my IBM should I use the Aptiva install application utility, or the Windows Add/Remove Software application. I want to be able to properly uninstall the application if I don't like it. A. Both of these mechanisms ultimately start the software installation utility specific to the application. For the large majority of applications, this means they will use an application from InstallShield called SETUP to actually perform the installation. This utility is responsible for creating the registration entries needed for deinstallation, and for leaving the .ISU file used to perform the uninstall. A comment: When you uninstall an application, the uninstaller will only remove those portions of the application that it put on the machine. There are three types of files to consider: a) files (and directories) placed by SETUP during installation into the application's directory, b) files placed by SETUP in a shared location such as WINDOWS\SYSTEM, and c) files created by the user. Files in category "a" will be removed. Files in category "b" might be removed, but if there is a possibility that they are also used by other applications, they will be left on the machine. If SETUP finds a shared component already in place, it bumps a "usage" counter to reflect that more than one application is using the component. Files in category "c" will never be removed. This later situation will often result in the directories/folders not being removed, with a consequent message that "uninstall was not able to remove" some files. Q. Does anyone use a laptop with Sprint PCS or other cellular service? A. A representative from Danbury Hospital says that they use it for some of their dial-up capabilities, and it works fine. Q. I have a new Aptiva and it gets corrupted. Specifically, it keeps finding multiple copies of the same device, installing them, and then complaining about it. For example, it reports that I have two mice, two sound cards, etc. If I delete them, they come back the next time I boot. A. We have seen this when Windows detects a device, installs a device driver but then, as part of the installation, asks for the diskette or CD from the manufacturer. The subsequent driver process then sets up an installation run for the next boot, and you end up loading the device driver again. The recommended process was to start the machine in SAFE MODE, then delete the device. Then shut down the machine and cold-boot it. When it finds new hardware, tell it to NOT install the device. Then go into the manual installation SETUP process on the diskette or CD provided by the manufacturer. This will prevent an incomplete and redundant install by making sure that there is only one request for the device in the registry at "\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce"

Bruce Preston is president of West Mountain Systems, Inc., a consultancy specializing in database technology. In addition to moderating the Random Access sessions during the General Meeting, he is a member of the DACS Board of Directors and is the chair of the DACS MS Access SIG.