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North East General
Interest Group Past Meetings
North-East Night May 2011 by
Ron Cummins John Grant called us all to order on a rather miserable wet and cold night that still brought out a a surprising number of members. He led off with something that he had picked up from Windows Secrets from clearly a real aficionado of the O/S. This latter had the view that you did not need to buy any other S/W to assist in the management of your computer. The inbuilt Firewall will cover any info. coming in and Windows Essential will do a good Antivirus job. Partition manager works well as does the Backup and Defrag utilities. John was just putting the info. out there with the caveat that he was not necessarily sponsoring this statement. The Q & A session that followed had enough mystery for a Sherlock Holmes story. What with vanishing sound , the disappearance and reappearance of AVG A/V, and two networked computers that refused to share files even though they could be clearly seen and identified on one computer from the other. The helpful message , " you have no authority to do this" merely adding fuel to the flames. After the break John yielded the floor to Colin who launched into a talk on his favourite program, "Total Commander". In his view this program, which Nigel Harris had first introduced the group to some years ago, was the complete answer to a maiden's prayer. It does just about everything. Its GUI consists of two panels side by side which will display any of the HDD and other storage facilities that you may have attached to the computer. This enables you to swap files from one device to another by just drag and drop. The tool bars are extensive giving access to a plethora of ways in which the files can be displayed, even as thumbnails. The toolbar also contains a number of calculators for all sorts of numerical tasks. The program will split files as well as combine them. It will add programs and also search for them by extension, e.g. "exe" files and also sort them. e.g. "doc" or "exe". You can add or remove attributes e.g. "read only". It will play media files and exhibit the data attached to images. It will pack and unpack files and even do backup from the panels. By the time Colin had finished his briefing it was hard to resist being caught up by his enthusiasm and it certainly turned me on enough to promise myself that I would pay more attention to my own copy. Another interesting night full of info. North East General Interest Group January 2011 By Ron Cummins John Grant welcomed us to the first meeting of the year and advised that he was seeking help in the running and organisation of programmes for the group. So this is a formal request for members to put up their hands and participate in this management. He then moved onto a favourite topic of his, Windows 7. He told us of the snipping tool , of which he is a real fan. This enables the excising of patches of the material on the monitor, whether text or image, by using a tool, either freehand or geometric, and subsequently pasting the excision into another program's material. In the Q and A session that followed the subject of programs that will capture video streams from the internet was raised and this sparked a lively discussion about i-view and U-tube.Another question was about uninstalling programs and the universal answer was to use "Your Uninstaller". After Q and A John then produced for us a list of websites culled from a PCUser Magazine article covering News and Current Affairs in a variety of ways, Image Collages, Health and On-line Shopping. A particularly interesting one is fitlab.com which will tailor you a fitness program to perhaps get rid of a bit of avoirdupois. John downloads a lot of music mostly in mp3 and flac formats and after tea he introduced us to some of his programs for converting these files to other formats such as wma. and cda. (for CDs). His usual one is MP3CD Converter which writes to a CD as a cda.file. Another is Fairstars Audio Converter which does the same. MP3 Audio Editor Gold will allow some editing of the tracks. He mentioned a program called Soft Archive that will tell you about the music but you then have to go to a commercial site to download it. He concluded the evening with a mention of the latest version of Faststone. (V4.3) . This version also allows the selection of a border to surround a chosen image. It will also allow you to convert say a RAW file to jpeg and also resize to produce a much smaller file, for instance down to 83kB. Remember, if you like your monthly meeting and find it useful, John needs some assistance. North East General Interest Group Otober 2010 By Ron Cummins John Grant
welcomed members to this month's meeting and advised us of a bargain that he
had picked up at the MLN Computer store in Burgundy St. It was an Iomega 1 TB
external HDD with power supply for $77. He also told us that Win 7, of which he
is a great fan, was now 1 y.o. The Q and A session was, as usual , a great opportunity to exchange all sorts of
useful info.between the audience. After the the tea break the running was taken
up by David Hatton, our local Linux guru, whose task it was to show us how to
instal this O/S as a dual boot alongside Win 7 or XP. This talk was one that he
had given to the NE Day group the previous month. However the precis here will I hope supplement the one in the current Melb
PC Magazine. The version that David used was Ubuntu 10.04, which is the latest
with long term support for 3 years. He advised that if you had the O/S on a USB stick it would be necessary to a make a
CD of it first. Having made the CD, run disk check before you use it to make
sure that it transferred accurately. The first step is to defrag the HDD on
which you want to instal the O/S. Then shut down Windows and restart using the
Ubuntu CD. There are 7 steps in the installation. After the Welcome screen you
will asked for the Time Zone, then the Keyboard layout (default is US ), then
prepare the disk space (formatting). this offers 3 options, side-by-side with
Windows, wipe the disk and instal, and specify the partitions manually.If the
latter is selected it will partition the disk. The next step is the question,
Who are you? Linux is a multiple user system, and this must be specified
together with a password for each user. You are then asked which accounts you
wish to migrate from Windows and it will give options to assist in this
decision.Finally there is the Ready to Instal screen which gives details of the
formatting. There is no Antivirus S/W for Linux. the security is provided by
the updates and these are regularly notified. If the user is on a dial up
connection it is possible to generate a shell script to identify the updates
and transfer this to a USB stick. The stick can then be taken to a computer
with a broadband connection and the updates downloaded to be transferred to the
originating computer. Ubuntu is but one of a number of Linux distributions each
of which contains the system kernel, Utility S/W, Window managers and a set of
application programs, such as Open Office. To David's great credit the installation
went without a hitch and lo, the Group had a Linux O/S on its laptop. North East General Interest Group April 2010 By Ron Cummins John Grant pened 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? |
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