| Melton
Computer Club
Minutes of Annual General Meeting 7th January 2009
1. Meeting started at 7.50pm.
2. Apologies received from
Derek Kerr, Keith Allen, Wendy & David Arkell, Graham Rock,
Peter Main, Larry Larsen, Diane Cave & Chris Fox-Mapletoft.
3. Minutes of 16th January
2008 were approved as a true record of the meeting.
4. Matters Arising
No Matters arising from the above minutes.
5. Chair’s Report
Apologies for Absence
6. Secretary’s Report
Once again we tried to offer a varied programme in 2008 and hopefully
there was a good range of subjects to get our teeth into. Our
Problem Solving Evening was well attended and appears to be a
favourite with the members. We will hopefully have another in
the first half of 2009. Other subjects covered included Music
and MP3 Conversion, The Ultimate Boot CD, Video Editing, Virtual
Machines and another foray into the world of Vista. Alan Danbury’s
evening on Tuning Your PC had everyone rushing to clear out all
that unwanted accumulated data that eventually grinds the computer
to a halt. My thanks to all those who contributed to make the
evenings such a success. We finished off the year with our annual
Photo Competition which as usual attracted a wide variety of excellent
photographs from the members. The standard again was a credit
to all who entered. Well done to Geoff Walsh for his overall winning
entry. Our thanks also go to Geoff for donating the wine for the
prizes. A suggestion was made that we exhibit the entries before
the Christmas Dinner for the wives and friends to see. We will
look into the feasibility of borrowing the room for half an hour
before the meal. Harry McKnight put on record his thanks to Derek
Taylor for his help in sorting out numerous computing problems
in the last year. Once again I would like to record our thanks
to Ben for organising another excellent night. Ben kindly offered
to organise this year’s dinner. New ideas for the programme
are always welcome and we will always do our best to accommodate.
We also welcome any member who wants to share their knowledge
with the rest of us. Please contact the committee members with
your ideas and suggestions for future meetings.
7. Treasurer’s Report
The finance statement shows
a loss of £41.49 on the previous year. Derek explained that
this was due to room hire for one extra meeting and re- registering
the club’s domain name for the next three years. Without
these extra costs, the club would have shown a small profit similar
to last year. However the cost of postage is scheduled to rise
in April and the club will need to absorb this. A brief comment
was made regarding the merits of posting the newsletter. Again
there was a range of different opinions among those present as
to the best way of distribution. Some work had been carried out
to see what the best format would be, but no firm decision had
been made. It was agreed that we needed a format that encouraged
people to open and read the newsletter. The committee agreed that
they would again look at the issue. Derek explained that although
the ethos of the club was to be non profit making, we were vulnerable
to a large expense such as a projector bulb replacement. Club
fees have been static at £12.00 per annum full membership
and £1.00 for associates. It was suggested that fees be
increased to £15.00 for full membership and £5.00
for associates. It was agreed that this still offered excellent
value for money over a course of the year. As the meeting was
not quorate, it was agreed that a motion be put at the February
meeting.
8. Elections
The following members were
elected:
Treasurer – Derek
Taylor
Proposed: Geoff Walsh
Seconded: Harry McKnight
Cttee Members –
Geoff Walsh
Re-elected unanimously
Steve Orrell
Proposed: Peter Simpson
Seconded: Geoff Walsh
Barry Gilchrist
Proposed: Derek Taylor
Seconded: Geoff Walsh
Thanks were recorded to
both Mike Taylor and Derek Kerr who had both decided to step down
from the committee this year.
9. Newsletter & Club
Website
The club website continues to be a medium for the Electronic Newsletter.
Articles are sparse and usually originate from the Newsletter.
Ideas to improve its content would be readily welcome.
The newsletter continues
to be well received. The discussion regarding its medium was covered
fairly extensively in the Treasurer’s Report. Members felt
that it was informative and a handy referral to previous presentations
and a good reminder for the next meeting. Most of the work creating
it is carried out by a minority of people and they could do with
some support with more articles. So please come forward to help
us out.
10. Feedback from 2008
topics and ideas for future topics
2008 had been well received
by members present and they felt that the presentations went well.
Topics for 2008 included
Music & MP3 Conversion
Problem Solving
Ultimate Boot CD
PC Tuning
Vista
Video Editing
Virtual Machines
Backup & Recovery of Files
Ideas for 2009 include
Desktop Publishing
Sony E Reader
Wireless networking
Backup & Recovery of Files part 2
Apple Iphone
Problem Solving
Programming XL
Food Database
The onsite broadband connection
has really helped expand our presentational horizons.
11. Any Other Business
It is the club’s 25th anniversary on the 14th March. The
membership was asked to consider how they would like to celebrate.
It is pretty unique for a computer club to have run unbroken for
so long, so we should be rightly proud of the achievement. Ideas
at the February meeting or to any committee member would be appreciated
12. Meeting closed at 9.00
pm.
25 Years
….. and still going
strong. For those of you not at the AGM last month we are celebrating
our Silver Anniversary this year. This must be an almost unique
occurrence as Computer Clubs have a pretty awful reputation of
being here today and gone tomorrow.
The club had its inaugural
meeting on Wednesday 14th March 1984 at the St John meeting room
on Asfordby Hill. In those days there was a plethora of computers
on the market, some famous and others not so popular. Of course
there was Sinclair with their own ZX range of micro computers
and Commodore were manufacturing the PET which I guess was aimed
at the business end of the market. Other strange beasts around
included the JUPITER ACE (which incidentally, was programmed in
FORTRAN), the ORIC, NASCOM and the ATMOS.
The majority of those original
members owned ATARI computers and this is the direction the club
chose to follow, hence our not too original name of “Melton
Mowbray Independent Atari Computer User Group”. However,
we were an enthusiastic bunch and soon got the show on the road
and the rest is history as they say. Original members include
Derek Taylor, Larry Larsen and Dave Robb. Forgive me if I’ve
missed anyone else who was with us at that very first meeting.
25 years is worth celebrating,
so what shall we do. We would like some ideas at the next meeting.
So please put your thinking caps on. A meal has already been suggested.
Dave Robb
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives failing
SEAGATE'S FLAGSHIP
Barracuda 7200.11 drives, in particular the 1TB (ST31000340AS)
units, are failing at an alarming rate. A new feature apparently
resides in faulty firmware microcode which will rear its ugly
head sometime at boot detection. Essentially the drive will be
working as normal for a while, then - out of the blue –
it fails. The next time you reboot your computer the drive will
simply lock itself up as a failsafe and won't be detected by the
BIOS
Seagate has apparently
diagnosed the problem and issued a new version of the firmware
to address it. However, drives that have already been affected
can't have the firmware applied to them due to their locked-down
status.
Drives that are affected were manufactured in Thailand and have
SD15 version of firmware.
It also appears that other
capacity drives in the same range are also affected. Full details
of the affected drives can be found on Seagate’s web site.
Seagate bungles firmware
update
Seagate had scrambled
the techies and produced a new firmware to flash the drives. So
far so good.
The new SD1A firmware promised to take away the pain even though
it did not solve the problem for people whose drives were already
dead. It would - according to the company - avoid the bricking
feature before it happened...
... If it worked.
Adding insult to already injured customers, there are reports
of users who have attempted the firmware flash and have ended
up with bricked drives. Yes. That's right... Paperweight city
all over the place. Seagate customers are up in arms.
Seagate has hastily removed
the offending firmware before any more customers get their drives
killed and is advising that a new firmware will be ready soon.
Naturally, if the drives are already bricked there won't be much
you can do in terms of applying new firmware - warranty replacement
seems to be the only solution right now.
The situation, of course, begs the obvious question: how
the heck does such a piece of firmware get launched without passing
through thorough testing and certification?
The new versions of firmware have now been made available on the
Seagate support web site and look to cover the full range of the
Barracuda 7200.11. So if you have a Seagate hard disk that is
likely to have been manufactured in the last few months I would
recommend that you check if it affected.
Seagate have provided some utilities that can be downloaded that
will give you the Model number and firmware version of your drives.
If your drive is one of the affected ones you can download the
ISO image that will create a bootable CD. When you have the CD
you need to disconnect any other drives and boot from the CD.
You then follow the on screen prompts and a few moments later
you should have a drive that will not lock up. I hope this is
the last we hear of this problem.
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