North East General Interest Group  April  2010    By Ron Cummins

John Grant Opened the meeting by introducing Joseph Wojciechowski,  a member of the Melb PC Committee, who was to be the main speaker for the evening. John then offered some info.  to people who had been having a problem with the Boot Options when using Vista /Win 7 by advising them to use “EasyBCD” , a free program that made the process a snip.   He then advised that when using   “Acronis” to clone a partitioned HDD to another larger HDD to use the manual option if the same size partitions were desired. The auto option will divide the larger drive in the original's ratio. The Q and A session that followed was wider ranging than usual benefiting by having Joe as a support to John. One topic that garnered a lot of interest was that of recovery from the inevitable crash when running even a small home network. Joe is a firm believer in Open Source S/W and told us that he relied on “FreeNAS” as a very useful get-out-of-jail card when literally one is at one's wits' end with getting a response from a computer in a network crash.    After the break Joe talked about cooling HDD and CPU. He likes to control the speed of cooling fans to cut down on the noise when running at full speed and showed us two fan speed controllers. One was a bank of four which cost him about $15 that fitted into a floppy disc bay and covered HDD and CPU. he then moved on to  “Firefox”,  the open source browser that will run on any Java-based system. He likes it for its extendability and its compliance with web-reading standards. It has a huge range of add-ons and he advised us to view the most popular ones such as ad-block and tree-style tab and use them.  Finally he moved onto Games and introduced us to favourite of his, “Runescape”. This is a complex multi-faceted game covering conflict, economic activity and social interaction. An ideal alternative to endless TV. He also mentioned an open source Flight Simulator with a huge range of choice in terrain and aircraft that could be had for $30. For those members who hankered after their boyhood days, they could be resurrected with” Trainz”.

North East General Interest Group   March  2010       By Ron Cummins         

John Grant welcomed members with some useful info that he had gleaned at Swap meets. HDD of 1TB at $105, 800GB at $85 and 500GB at $65, Pioneer dual layer 22x DVD burner at $43, a USB3 M/Bd at $430 and a 24in. 3D monitor with 3 yr. warranty at $239. He then moved to Q and A and we were soon plunged into the weird and wonderful world of glitches. This month's mysteries included a misfiring V.engine.i.e.dll file that appeared to be associated with the Comodo firewall and a missing 4 GB on a HDD that could not be located. About the only fix that the owner of this quirk had not tried was Checkdisc. The outcome will be awaited with baited breath. David Hatton then advised the group that his 3rd Monday night on Linux at 6-8.15pm in Watsonia would include a hands-on help session. After the break the floor was given to Hasan Coskun and Murray Roberts of Lako Pacific. These two then gave us a briefing on two products from Kaiser Baas. These were Music Maker and Photomaker Pro.The former was a small box containing a pre-amp. and an A-D converter that connects your turntable directly to the computer via a USB powered connection and S/w, Spin it Again, that takes you through the conversion process. A useful feature is that it will break up an LP into its constituent tracks when copnverting a whole album.It also provides facilities for removal of the usual wear faults that plague well-loved vinyls. The S/W  has a range of capabilities including Frequency Band manipulation, recording speed adjustment, splitting editing and deleting passages, and importing other sound files. If 0n-line it will seek album info. and add it automatically.  The second product, Photomaker Pro, is a cube shaped box with a 5 MPixel camera which converts slides and negatives(even 110mm) to digital images and downloads to an SD card so that a PC is not needed in this operation.  It has a flip-up lid with a 2.4 inch screen that enables any adjustments to the image before saving to SD. It also contains editing S/W for subsequent manipulation on a PC. Another version, the Photomaker does not have the SD facility and connects directly to the PC

North East General Interest Group   February  2010       By Ron Cummins         

 John Grant welcomed members to the meeting and gave us another of his very useful poop sheets. This was copied from Ian "Gizmo" Richards and contained a list of productivity enhancing keyboard shortcuts. He then launched the Q and A session which proved yet again how idiosyncratic members' computers can become. Invariably the problems appear to be "one-offs" with other members not suffering but vouchsafing possible solutions."Google it" is increasingly becoming the catchword. In connection with Google there was some discussion about "Scroogle" which is a site that will confer anonymity to the Googler. John then talked about the website " Windows secrets" to which he subscribes. He told us that the free version ran to about 8 pages and the paid one between 15-18. It comes out every fortnight and he is a fan of the Lounge facility which is a sort of blog page that covers all aspects of the OS. The meeting then devoted some discussion to the virtues of Acronis True Image, another of John's favourite programs which is a comprehensive and reliable back-up program. Allan Medforth seconded this with a story of how he had reliably restored his Drive C after a mishap with his Win 7 when it refused to open the video editing program that he wanted and insisted on opening another one instead. Who says that computers don't know best?    After tea, John, indefatigable as ever, gave each of his audience a disc of portable programs to complement his earlier one that he distributed last year. Again he advised that members would have to try them on their own computers as there was no guarantee that they would all perform.  Although designed for USB sticks they work faster if installed on a HDD. Any feedback on their performance would be welcome.