Kokomo PC Users Group

Volume 19 Issue 10...October 2001

Presidents Message

I would like to offer my condolences to anyone who has suffered a loss as a result of the horrible actions taken by the terrorists. In a way, we have all had some bit of innocence stolen from us by these events. I decided to go ahead with the September meeting to help us to all get back to normal after our tragic loss of Richard Coop in July. We have had some trouble getting back on track after Richard’s passing and I felt that September was our first chance to have a ‘normal’ meeting.

Last month’s meeting was a great success. We had good attendance and almost everyone had something to contribute to the discussion. As usual, we had a very good question and answer session. After that, we had our very first ‘low-impact’ presentation on the Windows operating system. Our founding father, Greg Ogle, gave a quick historical overview of Windows. He had a very complex chart that showed the evolution of windows and the Intel hardware that was available to run it on. When he was done, we had a robust discussion of Windows that had something for everyone. I am looking forward to our next ‘low-impact’ presentation in November on Word Processors.

The Group is still in need of a Treasurer. The job is straight forward and does not require a huge time commitment. The job of treasurer includes several simple tasks. Keep a set of books to track income and outgo (About 1 deposit and 1 check per month.) Attend regular meetings and collect dues. Deposit dues in the bank and keep the membership roster up to date. Attend officers meetings once a month and produce a treasurers report. It takes about three hours per month plus the regular meetings. This is a great way to help the Group.

We have had excellent participation in the newsletter. In both August and September we have had guest columnists provide us with their experiences and insights. I would encourage all of you to take the time to contribute a page of your wisdom to the newsletter. You will receive a User Buck and will have the satisfaction of knowing that you have provided a great service to the Group.

Mark Pendergast

Da Prez

[email protected]

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Windows Explorer - Finding lost files

Every now and again I lose something on my computer. I saved it in an odd place, called it something I can’t remember or dragged and dropped it into the Twilight Zone. I can usually find these things by hunting around and searching every branch in the directory tree, but this is a bother and a waste of time.

There is a magic command in the Windows Explorer that can help finds these lost files. Form the main menu of Windows Explorer type:

Tools > Find > Files or folders

This brings up the ‘Find: All files’ dialog box. There are three tabs available. The first tab is called Name & Location. It is the only one that most people use. It works just great if you know what you called your file. Even if you remember the type of file you can use the ‘*’ wildcard to find *.doc or *.txt.

The second tab is called Date. This tab is pure magic. You can look for files that were modified in a time period or in the last few months or the last few days. You can also look for files that were created or even files that were just accessed or read in the same time period.

For example, if you created a file this morning and forgot everything about it, just go to the Tools > Find > Files or Folders command and the Date tab and ask for all files modified in the last 1 days. You will get a bunch of system type files that were updated by the normal operation of Windows and also your file that you forgot about. This can be a life saver.

The last tab is called Advanced. It is normally not as useful as the Date tab, but can help when the other tabs return too much information. Yes, all the Tabs work together. You can specify information on all three tabs and they will all be taken into consideration. The ‘Size is’ field on the Advanced tab is useful when you are looking for something very large or very small.

For example, lets say I saw a GIF file on the Internet and know it is somewhere in my netscape cache. I use the Find dialog to find all *.GIF files that are less than one day old. Yikes, I get hundreds of them. I can now use the Advanced tab to add that the file is more than 100K bytes. This gets rid of all the thumbnails and buttons and only returns the large graphics.

Another useful feature that works some of the time is that many windows programs keep a temp file on the disk to hold data before you save it. If your computer locks up or crashes before you save your document, all is not lost. Use the Find command to look for files less than a day old. Look for anything that has the same extension as the program you are using. (Something like 123456.DOC or temp.TXT). Open the file and see what is inside. You may just recover some of your work. Not all programs support this feature, but it is worth a try.

If you have any tips or tricks, I would love to hear them. Please write them up for the newsletter and email them to me. It does not need to be fancy, just good information. I would love to hear from you.

Mark Pendergast

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The Nimda Virus

The Nimda Virus is on the loose. The virus is one of the most sophisticated ever released. It has already caused millions of dollars of damage. This might be a good time to update your virus protection.

The Nimda virus attacks the Microsoft internet products. This includes Outlook mail, Internet Explorer Browser and the IIS Web server. The virus takes advantage of many of the security holes in Microsoft products so you can be infected many ways.

The most common way to be infected is to launch an infected attachment called "readme.exe". This requires double clicking on an attachment with the EXE extension. Most of us have been trained to avoid launching unknown attachments with EXE extensions, so if that were the only way it spread it would have been dead in a week.

Unfortunately the virus has several other routes for infection.

If your security settings are too low on Microsoft Outlook the virus can launch itself from the preview panel on Outlook. You don’t even have to launch the attachment, it launches itself.

Also, If your security settings are too low in Internet Explorer, the virus can launch itself just by surfing an infected Microsoft IIS Web server based site. Again, you don’t have to click on anything, just looking at the main page is enough.

When you become infected with Nimda, the virus works hard to spread itself. It sends out mail messages to everyone in your address book. It then begins looking for IIS web sites on the network and infects them as well. It also infects your hard drive and any network shared drives that you have access to with your computer.

I have not heard about any type of damage that the virus does to the host system. Some of the early reports said that it could corrupt files, but I do not believe that is the case. It seems to try primarily to spread itself After it has infected as many machines as it can, it goes to sleep for ten days and then tries again.

If you have any additional information on this virus or any other topic of interest to the Group, please write a one page article on it and send it to me. I will be glad to publish it, our Group members will be glad to read it and you will be glad to have helped your fellow group members. You will also receive a User Buck for each page or original material published.

Mark Pendergast

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Windows XP Activation

There is a new feature that comes with the Windows XP operating system. This feature does not improve the reliability of Windows. It does not improve the speed or usability. It is called Activation and it is basically a copy protection scheme like we used to have in the early days of the PC era.

If you buy a system with Windows XP already loaded, you will see no difference if you do not change any hardware.

If you purchase Windows XP, you will have some extra steps to do before you can use it. When you load Windows XP it will analyze 10 of the components of your system and develop a secret code number based on what you have. You must then call Microsoft and give them the code number and they will give you an Activation code that allows Windows XP to work on your machine.

Every time you start up your computer, Windows XP re-computes your secret code number and compares it to the Activation code you got from Microsoft. As long as everything is the same, Windows starts up with no complaints. If you never make hardware changes to your computer, then this is the end of the story. Other than the initial call, you will see no difference if you do not change hardware.

When you change hardware in your system Windows XP keeps track of what you are doing. If you only make one or two changes, the system will continue to run and keep silent. Microsoft has set a trigger point where Windows XP gets grumpy. If you do not have a Ethernet LAN card the level is 6 changes, if you do it is 4 changes.

How can you get to 6 changes? Well my guess is that the 10 components tracked are Motherboard, CPU, Disk drives, CD ROM Drives, Sound Card, Video Card, Modem, LAN Card, Monitor, and Tape Drive. (Or something like that.) The easy way to get to 6 changes is to replace your system with a new one and try to reuse the Operating System. The hard way is to individually upgrade 6 of these items. This seems like a lot, but I have come close to 6 changes as my systems have aged and I have added or changed components.

When you cross the trigger point Windows refuses to boot and tells you to call Microsoft. In theory you give Microsoft the new secret code number, explain why your machine has changed so much and they give you a new activation code.

I suspect that for first time callers it will actually be that simple. Microsoft will probably have a policy of one freebie to keep the masses from killing them. The people who will have trouble will be the true hobbyist that changes his configuration every week and the pirate.

The hobbyist will probably switch to LINUX before she is done, or stick with Windows ME or Windows 2000. My bet is that there are so few true hobbyists any more that Microsoft just doesn’t care.

The pirate will sniff around until he can decode the authorization code and then be able to pirate just like he used to. I find it hard to believe that some bright cracker that is making thousands of dollars selling contraband Windows CDs won’t come up with a patch to Windows XP to cancel out the check code and have it always pass.

I do not believe that the average user will even notice this change. But, I also feel everyone should be aware of it just the same.

Mark Pendergast

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Word Procesor Tips and Tricks

The Word Processor is probably the most common tool (other than Internet tools like mail and the web) used by most people. There are thousands of uses for nicely formatted letters or documents. Even with all this activity most people know only about 10% of the things that they can do with their tool.

Here are a few of the tips and tricks I have learned over the years. I hope you enjoy them.

Edit > Select All

Use the Edit > Select All command to select an entire document. This is quicker and more reliable than selecting by dragging through the entire document.

Shift click

Place the cursor at the beginning of the area you want to select. Use the scroll bar to move to the end of the area you want to select. Hold down the shift key and click where you want the selection to end. This will highlight the entire area. This is also more reliable than dragging through the entire selection.

Edit > Paste Special

Sometimes you want to import text from one application into another. You select the text in one application and use cut. Then you use paste to transfer it to your Word Processor. To your surprise it comes in as an un-editable image. Instead of using paste, use Paste special and choose RTF or text format. This will paste just the text from the clipboard. I have noticed this problem with some web pages and spreadsheets.

Mark Pendergast

Newsletter & Presentation User Bux:

Aug. - C. Hanna $1, M. Pendergast $2

Sep. - R. Malkoff $1, M. Pendergast $2, Greg Ogle $2

October 2001

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