Q&A began the meeting with a query on the vagaries of printing in reverse and the dependence on printer drivers.  Manual stacking was offered as a last resort.

ZoneAlarm versions were discussed with recommendation for a mature recent version, not the latest. 

Optus webmail’s slowness was a complaint; PopPeeper was said to enable mail checking before downloading.  A new ‘hosts’ file can minimise ads.

A question on RegCleaner led to a caution on its hyperthreading and a note that the author’s JV16 was better.

Then followed discussion on IE7 text size versus zoom and finding that not all things are possible, though a great improvement. 

Defragging was argued over with news of an interrupted 11 hour defrag by Paragon leaving a lost disk!  Diskkeeper and Vopt were said to be better alternatives. Ease of file recovery is seen as a real benefit of the process.

The absence of Word docs as mail attachments brought up the use of Pando to carry large email files. 

A question on hardware versus software firewalls told of the internal invisibility of PCs on a network.  F/w programs prevent ‘phoning home’.

 

For the Win98SE reliers we were shown a means of streamlining 98SE even though support is officially ended.  MS has a secret area!  There’s also improved USB drivers available.  (See links on SIG pages.)

Vista tweaking was shown via Yamicsoft’s Vista Manager and an emerging crop of sites like itsvista and vistasupport. 

Thanks from all to Peter H and Bob T.