Seniors - Tuesday Group

JANUARY 2010 - REPORT

Welcome back for the start of the new year. We had 16 members for our first meeting of the year.

We opened the meeting talking about the problems, outlined by the German Goverment, with Internet Explorer.

"German government warns against using Microsoft Internet Explorer The German government has warned against using Internet Explorer after a security flaw left it vulnerable to hackers. Hackers in China had pried into e-mail accounts of human rights activists. The company said, however, that the hole could be closed by setting the browser's Internet security zone to "high", although this limits functionality and blocks many websites. However, German authorities say that even this would not make IE fully safe."
However we all use Mozilla don't we!!!!!!

We had a discussion about the problem with downloads that add extra things that you probably do not want. "Bonjour" was mentioned and Peter Collard pointed out the problems he had uninstalling it and that it kept coming back.

Thomas had an email, in OE, rejected because of an attachment. He then talked us throught the steps he took to overcome the problem.

Roger asked what was the concensus in turning on a computer/USB printer combination. Different members outlined what they did and what problems they also had. John Lucke said he had a printer connected via a wireless router which was rather slow. It was suggested increasing the size of the buffer might help. John also added he had just bought a new 1Tb Seagate external hard drive and discovered a free basic copy of Acronis was included with it.

John Shortland, who won a copy of Windows 7 at the main meeting wanted to put it on a particular partition on his hard drive but found that "disk managment" would not allow him to increase the partition size only decrease it. To increase the size you need a third party program.
John said the copy of Windows 7 he received was a 64 bit copy however his machine is 32 bit, after reading the literature and talking to people he has installed his copy so far without problems.

Peter Shelden (I think) said he was having problems when viewing a video in that it kept stopping.
Suggestion was, wait until it full cached or pause it and allow the cache to catch up.

It was asked can the Windows patch files (kb******.exe) be removed - however, it was suggested it is perhaps best not to remove them and let the system look after them. Peter Collard thought he had observed that after a period of time, as new ones came, the older ones disappeared.

John Ewing, who is now running Windows 7, raised a problem he has encountered with his Yahoo accounts. On his earlier systems he was able to open 3 Yahoo accounts at one time but with Windows 7 he could only open 2. He then demonstated for us by opening 2 accounts but when he tried to open a third account it closed the first one. The discussion ran it to the coffee break and I don't think we solved the problem. So if anybody can help John please let us know.

I was not aware, until it was pointed out by Bob Backstrom that we had not had "sound" on the Windows 7 system on the groups computer since August. After the break we decided to look into the problem. It did turn out to be relative easy to fix, first we uninstalled the sound device in Device Manager and then clicked on action/scan and this reinstalled the sound.

Now we had sound this allowed me to raise a problem I had with Open Office Presentation. I had received two Powerpoint files, in one, using Open Office, the sound worked but not in the other. Peter Collard said this is a problem in "Presentation" and to download Powerpoint viewer to over come the problem.

Finally Bill Parry put forward the proposal to start a new SIG for smartphones. It was suggested that it could fit in to the Commuications SIG.
If people are interested forward comments to Bill.

Next Tuesday Seniors SIG will be on 16 February hope to see you all there.

Cheers,
Graham Grant

Auslogics Disk Defrag is Free and Easy

Auslogics Defrag Disk fragmentation leads to system slowdowns, PC crashes, slow start-ups and shut-downs. Auslogics Disk Defrag is designed for fast de-fragmentation of modern hard disks. The new version can also consolidate free space and optimize system files placement. However, with all the advanced techniques of disk optimization, Disk Defrag 3 still remains extremely compact and even easier to use! Click to download Disk Defrag which is absolutely FREE for home users. I have used this product and found it to be very good. jl.

NOVEMBER 2009 - REPORT

Hello Everybody.

We had a smaller than normal turnout for our Tuesday's SIG but it was, I think, none the less entertaining.
We opened the meeting with a discussion on "Microsoft Genuine Advantage program". It was noted there was problems with a pre-installed Dell laptop was showing an illegal copy when trying to register with Microsoft. Members outlined some problems they had and how they overcame the problem. It was noted that the same can apply to "Office"

A question was asked about uninstalling programs and it was suggested that "Revo" was an excellent choice. I pointed out that I had used Revo to uninstall a genealogy program and it did not remove all parts. I found it left among other things an "ini" file in AppData/Roaming/my genealogy program. When I reinstalled the program it was not the clean installation I had hoped for.

We then had a discussion on the different upgrades available for Windows 7.

John Shortland had installed IE8 but had problems viewing some pages, first he had to reinstall "active x". Still with problems he re installed IE7, he then had the problem "run once" and his home page would not open. He "googled" the problem and was told to reinstall IE6 and then reinstall IE8. John said everything runs OK in Win 7 and Vista but the problems remain in XP.

John then raised problems with the "Trusted Zone", this was in relation to Googles maps. We went through the process of adding a site to the "Trusted Sites" in the Security tab of IE8 Internet options. Also showed the difference if the "Requires server verification (https:) for all sites in the zone". tab is ticked. This allows the discussion to talk about cookies and history. (files sizes etc.)

Bill gave an overview of the stand-alone Windows Live Mail (not to be confused with Windows Mail within Vista) saying he was very pleased with this latest email client and found it easy to use.

After the break I gave a talk on Font Managers. I had the idea from a web site that I subscribed to called Mintywhite.com. A few days earlier it had suggested a free Font Manager that you might like to check out. The site also regularly has down-loads of unusual fonts.
I then demonstrated 5 free Font Managers and a paid one. As I went through them they increased in features but, as we will see, one stood out over the others.

The first free one was Font Viewer1.3, this was the most basic with the least features. It allowed you to scroll through each font one at a time, increase the font size and show each font in Bold and Italic. You can also view a "Character Map" for each font.

The second manager is "AMP Font Viewer", this had the added features in you could view the fonts Underlined and also changed the colour of the viewed fonts. The ANSI codes for the fonts could be viewed. Also you can get a view of all the fonts on a scrolled page.

Next was "Font Manager 3.5", this also showed 'Underscore' also it has a good Character Map viewer and it gave a written description of each font. This one was the first to have a good help manual.

Then "Windows Font Explorer", this had all the features as in Font Manager 3.5 but you could not maximize the window, which was considered a disadvantage. You also had to type in your own text before viewing it with the different fonts. This program allows you to navigate directly to the 'Windows Fonts Folder' from within the program.

The last of the free programs was "FontPage v3.0.2", this program had the most features including all on the other programs but also it allowed you to compare 2 fonts one above the other. It also had a 'Slideshow' which scrolled through each of the fonts in turn. It was interesting the first time but I don't see it being useful over time. The program allowed you to view the different types of installed fonts such as vector, raster, open types and true types.

The final program was the paid one called MainType2.1 and this program cost $30.00 with a 30 day free trial. This program had all the bells and whistles including a good help file and was also very configurable. However unless you have the need to use this type program in say web or poster design most probably a free program would cover all the normal uses.
The consensus after the talk was that Font Manager 3.5 was most probably, because of it's layout, the best of the free ones. You can also download it under a different name called "Free and Easy Font Viewer" that does not need registration.