| This
Month's Topic
Tune
Your PC
Future Meetings
Below is a list of dates for 2008,
these dates have been confirmed.
July 2nd
August 20th
September 17th
October 15th
November 12th
December 10th
Last
Month….
You
switch on the system and it whirs into life but instead of your
usual friendly desktop there is a blue screen. A cold shiver runs
down your spine – the blue screen of death has hit you.
A system failure? You try again but to no avail, disaster has
struck.
Steve
Orrell had this problem and knows only to well the pain and aggravation
in trying to rebuild a system after a major computer melt down.
Steve however is made of stern stuff and he went about seeing
if there is a way of retrieving sanity from such a disaster and
this was the subject of his presentation.
Steve
came up with a couple of alternatives to help recover your system.
His first option was The Ultimate Boot CD. This is a recovery
package for Windows XP which I am reliably informed will work
with Windows 2000. The Ultimate Boot CD is free and open source.
With
the aid of a slide presentation, Steve explained the process of
obtaining the CD. Firstly you must obtain an ISO image file from
the internet. This can be obtained from
www.ubcd4win.com which seems to be a pretty comprehensive site
with lots of information. Once obtained, the ISO file can be burnt
to a stand alone CD. Steve explained that you also need an original
installation Windows XP disk and have service pack 2 running on
your operating system.
What
does it do? Steve explained that its functions were :-
Boot into Windows, Registry recovery, Online connection, Virus
scan, Data recovery and a systems analysis. He then went on to
demonstrate the package. Firstly it is not swift and took around
6 minutes to boot up. During boot up it creates a small B drive
on the hard disk where it does all its work. Steve then went through
some of the many options available.
Steve
had another offering which does a similar job which was the Linux
Distro based Mepis 7. This package functions include Bypassing
Windows, Boot into Linux, Online connection, Online virus scan
and Data recovery. Creating the disk is similar to the previous
package where you need to burn an ISO image file to CD. This can
be obtained again from the internet – www.mepis.org is the
place to go.
Again
Steve did a thorough job of demonstrating the packages capabilities
and ran through some of the functions available to the user. Another
very powerful package.
This
was a very comprehensive presentation and I am sorry if I have
not done it the justice it deserves from my write up. However
if you are interested in researching this subject further, the
two websites mentioned have a wealth of information and I am sure
Steve would be kind enough to point you in the right directions.
Our
thanks to Steve for an excellent presentation.
Dave Robb
XP's Window Is About to Close
Now is the time to buy Windows! Windows XP, there's a rapidly-approaching
deadline that will affect anyone who has a need to run Windows,
so I thought I'd do my part to spread the word. If you weren't
aware, Microsoft will no longer sell Windows XP after June 30,
2008. With less than a week to go, if you've been thinking about
buying Windows XP to use with Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion,
now is the time to act.
Don't be concerned that you'll be buying a soon-to-be-abandoned
operating system. Even though Microsoft won't sell XP any longer,
it will still be a supported operating system for many years to
come. Microsoft has committed to providing "business as usual"
updates (mainstream support) through April 14, 2009, followed
by "extended support" through 2014. Mainstream support
means there may be updates to Windows XP that provide new features
between now and next April, and that warranty claims and no-charge-incidents
will be handled. In the extended support mode, there won't be
any new features, and warranty coverage and no-charge-incident
support won't be available. (If you're bored, the Microsoft Support
Lifecycle Policy FAQ explains all of this in great detail.)
So why would you want to purchase XP for use with Fusion or Parallels,
instead of Vista, Microsoft's current desktop OS? There are three
main reasons as why this might make sense. First, XP runs faster
than Vista in both Fusion and Parallels. Because Windows XP is
a relatively "light" operating system, it doesn't place
as much demand on the CPU as does Vista--nor does it need as much
RAM. As a result, you'll find that virtual machines running XP
feel snappier than their Vista counterparts on the same hardware,
as more of the machine's CPU and memory are available for programs
running within the OS.
Second, XP offers the widest support for third-party hardware
and software--there are still quite a few programs and/or pieces
of hardware that either don't work quite right, or don't work
at all, with Vista. Windows XP has no such problems--with it's
long history, it supports the widest variety of hardware and software.
This will be more of an issue if you're wanting to run an older
Windows program, or use an older peripheral, with your Windows
installation--new programs and hardware should work fine in either
version of Windows.
Third, XP is a solid, stable OS that's had any major issues addressed
via service pack releases over the years. By comparison, Vista
is still in its infancy, and there are things about it (user access
control, argh!) that will hopefully be addressed in future updates.
Windows XP is the version of Windows to run when using Fusion
or Parallels. Major crashes while running Windows XP are rare,
and its performance is fine even on aging first-generation Intel-powered
machines. You can make Vista perform reasonably well on that same
box, but it takes more tweaking of the user interface and system
settings.
If you've been sitting on the fence about which version of Windows
to buy for your virtualization solution, my advice would be to
purchase a copy of Windows XP before the deadline passes. Windows
XP comes in two versions--Professional and Home. The Home version
is much cheaper, but gives up some features--most notably the
ability to share files and folders--over the Professional version.
But whichever version you're considering, make your decision quickly
and act before June 30th (although many vendors will probably
still have copies in the channel after that date).
Google
There’s
a lot more to the Google search box than meets the eye.
For those in the know, it’s a currency converter, a dictionary,
a thesaurus and a calculator, and the techniques for getting Google
to perform these tricks are simple and memorable.
You can get Google to instantly tell you what the weather is like
in a certain place, what the time is in another country and when
a film is showing in a cinema near you. And we'll reveal how Something
I have recently found out is that you can retrieve pages from
Google’s cache, and even how to see what a particular page
was like many months or even years ago.
Check
the time in other countries
Google can tell you what time it is in other countries, right
from the search bar. Type time paris, for example, to find out
what time it is in Paris right now.
Retrieve
unavailable pages
If a Google search result won’t load, notice that underneath
the listing there’s a link that says “cached”.
This takes you to the version of the page that’s stored
in Google’s cache, so you can read it even if the site is
down. Sometimes you can use the Google cache to view pages that
have been blocked by network administrators. To do this, type
cache:site.com into the search bar.
This won’t always work, because the Google cache is sometimes
blocked as well to scupper the technique. A further reason why
you might like to use the Google cache is if you click through
to a long document and can’t see where your search keywords
appear.
You can hit [Ctrl] + [F] to do a search of the page, but you might
prefer to see all the terms highlighted. If so, go to the cached
version and each instance of a keyword is highlighted with a different
colour for each one.
Protect
your privacy
Search engines keep a log of everything that’s typed into
them.
Each entry is associated with a unique identifier, so if there
were a data breach it could be possible for someone to string
together your search history.
To keep things private, you need to log out of your Google account
when conducting sensitive searches. You can also delete your cookies,
but this will mean that sites that usually identify you, such
as Amazon and iGoogle, will fail to do so.
A good resource is Scroogle, which enables you to conduct a Google
search without having it linked back to you (http://scroogle.org).
Use
the Google search bar as a dictionary
Find definitions for words using the define: operator in the Google
search bar. For example, type define: verisimilitude to obtain
ten different definitions from various sources.
It’s also useful if you’re not sure of the spelling
of a word, because Google will show you the correct spelling if
you get it wrong.
Google
Experimental search
Go to www.google.com/ experimental/ to try out some of Google’s
new features that are still being tested. The most interesting
new feature is the timeline, which places your search results
in date order.
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