This month’s Q&A began with an examination of reinstalling Windows 98SE on PCs that are still running well with it.

    Pointers to the Autopatcher site (see SIG meeting notes) were reprised together with the USB updates.

    Many users are maintaining at least one 98 box.

   

    Air Traffic Control wouldn’t remove.    Unlocker was said to be very good and Chkdsk – both upon reboot.

   

    The student version of Office07 was giving trouble with warnings; removal of old versions was suggested.

    This led to talk of the new .docx file format (reversion is a settable option), and to avoidance of ‘fast saves’ that bloat files.

   

    ExplorerXP was shown – a file manager – and it looked like a powerful and straightforward ‘better Win Explorer’.

    Directory Opus (Australian) was compared.

 

    Windows updates were discussed and it was thought that a two week delay after release was advisable (re bugs of bug-fixes).

    Autopatcher’s intentional delay was noted.

    Browser differences were discussed again with Firefox handing text sizes well but IE better suited for maps.

    NB Firefox can run IE tabs internally.  This led to the difference in use of the old Microsoft Java and Sun’s

    that is updated periodically.

 

    Autohide of Notification Area (System Tray) icons talk leaned towards seeing all that was going on – so Unhide.

 

    Mozbackup was cited as a very efficient backerupper of a things Mozilla Firefox.

 

    After the break Peter took us through further Vista tweaking with a warning of Incredimail! corrupting the OS.

    ‘Vista Manager’ was revisited and Nirsoft.net utilities were remembered.

    From the desktop right-click IE can be started without add-ons.

    The meeting finished with Vista backup alternatives, Partition Magic’s aging, and the Petri Israeli site.

     A very interesting night!