Kokomo PC Users Group

Volume 20 Issue 1...January 2002

President’s Message:

Welcome to a new year of PC computing. I hope Santa was good to you and left some new gizmo or program in your stocking. I was glad to see we got a light dusting of snow in time for Christmas. The weather was so nice before Christmas I thought we might have a ‘green’ Christmas, rather than our usual ‘brown’ one.

I apologize for missing the December Meeting, but my son was in his first Christmas concert and I wanted to see him perform. I hope we had a good attendance at the meeting and everyone had a good time.

Our January meeting will be a panel discussion of Spreadsheets. Another in our series of ‘Low Stress’ presentations. If anyone would like to lead all or part of the discussion, I would be happy to let them ‘strut their stuff’.

We are always interested in new ideas for presentations at our meetings. If you have an idea for the February meeting please let one of the officers know and we will try to arrange it.

We have also talked about hosting a swap meet. Does anyone have an interest in organizing it? I think we all have stuff we have purchased that we no longer need. If you would like to help us organize one please let one of the officers know.

If anyone would like to participate in the Leadership of the Group we would love to have you join us at the Leadership meeting. We have a history of adding ‘at-large’ directors to the Leadership team on very short notice. The pay isn’t very good, but the rewards are outstanding. The leaders normally meet the Tuesday before the first Thursday of the month. (Sometimes this works out to be in the previous month.) The next Leadership meeting will be February 5th at 7pm at the Wendys restaurant on South LaFountain. Hope to see you there.

Mark Pendergast

Da Prez

[email protected]

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2002 things to do with your computer in the new year

(Just Kidding)

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Windows XP - One month status report

Our family got a new computer for Christmas. Unfortunately it came with Windows XP installed. This has caused no end of problems for us. Very few of the hundred or so CD ROMs we own will run on the new system.

On the whole it looks like Windows XP is much the same as Windows 95/98/ME.

The first difference you might notice is that the login screen is different. It is icon based rather than text menu based. The opening screen asks you to pick the icon of the account you wish to use to log on.

The desktop looks about the same. The start menu looks a little weird, but not that much different than you would expect. All the same functions are available. They are just in two columns instead of one.

One feature that has become annoying is the ability to have multiple users logged into the computer at once and to switch between them. This may be useful for some power user, but it causes me two problems.

First, the kids tend to get two sessions going with big games loaded. This slows down performance and if enough stuff is running can cause things to get flaky. (I bought the computer with 128MB of RAM memory. I thought this was a ton. I read in the Windows XP Secrets book that 128MB is just adequate and that you really need 256MB to run multiple programs, etc.)

Second, when you go to shut down the computer, it reminds you that there are multiple sessions open and that anything that was not saved in the other sessions will be lost. This means that you need to log off and switch between sessions to ensure that all sessions are shut down properly. (Not much fun when you just want to shut down the computer and go to bed.)

The major headache is ,of course, the inability to run games. Most games that say they will run on Windows 2000 seem to run fine on XP.

Many of the very simple Windows 95/98/ME games will run on XP. For example: Monopoly and the Game of Life. (Computerized board games.) These games do not seem to push the graphics or sound past what the Windows NT based core of Windows XP will allow.

Almost no graphics and sound intensive games for Windows 95/98/ME will run on Windows XP.

‘Civilization II’ will run just fine, but the sound will not play. ‘Machines’ will not even run. XP seems to know it is not a Win32 based program. ‘Age of Empires’ would lock up from time to time.

We were able to fix the problems with Age of Empires. Windows XP comes with a utility program called the Compatibility Wizard. It can simulate some aspects of Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows 2000. This does not mean that it can work miracles, but if the program does something that is just a little bit odd, or uses some feature that is specific to just one operating system, it can be duplicated in Windows XP.

There are also more detailed fixes available. These are called ‘shims’. They are pieces of code that Microsoft wrote to enable some typical ‘bad code’ to work under Windows XP. There are about 200 shims that come with Windows XP. I have not done much of this yet, but I may try it when I get some time.

There are two ways to apply the fixes to the system. The Compatibility Administration tool is a utility program that allows you to search a database of applications with known bugs and apply the fixes you need to get them to run properly. Just select the program you want to fix from the database list and the program goes out and fixes it based on Microsoft’s analysis of what it needs.

The QFixApp utility program is for more advanced users. It allows you to apply any or all of the 200 available shims to a program to see it if it will fix the system. Obviously you need to understand your program and the individual shims to make this work. (Or you need a lot of spare time to try all combinations of shims by trial and error.)

As I learn more about the Windows XP system I will try to pass this information along. If anyone out there has a better understanding of the system and would like to share their knowledge with the Group, please email me an article and I will publish it in the newsletter. I would like to learn as must as I can about Windows XP and I am quite sure that someone else must have more knowledge than I do.

Mark Pendergast

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Things I hate about Windows XP.

1. A 128MB drive was an huge hard drive under DOS, now 128MB of RAM is barely enough to run Windows XP.

2. I switched from Apple to IBM so I could always run my old programs and buy plenty of cheap software, now with XP few of my old programs run and I can’t buy XP compatible software for less than $60.

3. I have a 1.6 GHz processor that is at least 20 times faster than my old computer, but it boots slower because of Windows XP.

Mark Pendergast

January 2002

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