February 2003
Volume 21, Issue 2
Kokomo PC
Users Group
A Message from the President:
The wind is howling and it is ten degrees outside. Sounds like great PC computing weather to me. Just fire up the old Pentium, turn the case around and let the fan blow that hot air from the power supply on your poor frostbitten toes.
My technology adventure from Christmas continues. I have mastered my Digital Camera and Palm Pilot PDA. My broadband router is hooked up and both our computers are surfing at warp speed across the internet. Ho ho ho!
We had an excellent meeting in January. The question and answer session was tremendous. We found out about screen prints the "Windows way" using the clipboard. We also saw a real cool web site called Shields Up at grc.com that allowed us to test our internet firewall protection. I led a discussion of MS Word. We explored pasting screen prints into word documents as well as the paste special command to capture text from web pages.
Once again we are being crowded out of Ivy Tech by their huge growth. We will continue to work with them to find room, but we may need to find a new night or a new home. If you have any thoughts on a new night or a new home please let one of the officers know. (Our biggest issue is finding a place that can supply us with a computer and projector for the presentation.)
The Group is always looking for interesting topics to use for presentations. If you have any ideas, please let one of the officers know. We are always happy to go out and find speakers on any topic of interest. We would also like feedback on our current selection of presentations. Do you like our low budget discussions of the MS office products? How about presentations by our own users? Do you like presentations by the local computer retailers? Your feedback is always welcome.
As always the group is in need of new members. Please encourage your friends to join us for the regular meetings. We still print a few extra newsletters. See Jane Ober (or myself while she is snowbirding) for an extra copy for a friend. If you have any ideas how we can expand our membership, please let one of the officers know. We are always looking for new ideas.
PS> The Groundhog saw his shadow on February second. Six more weeks of winter means six more weeks of prime PC computing weather. Life just doesn’t get any better than this.
Happy PC computing to you all.
Mark Pendergast
Da Prez
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Wacky Computer Word Scramble
Try to unscramble these common computer words. (Answers at the end of the newsletter. No peeking!)
1. MUNTIPE
2. SCRIFTOOM
3. WOWDINS
4. DRYKABOE
5. USOME
6. TROOMIN
7. DUMITALIEM
8. TRENINTE
Mark Pendergast
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Windows Key Tricks
Most keyboards include a Windows key (winkey). It's on the bottom row, next to Alt, and has a little flag on it. It's really useful in combination with other keys. For example:
-- WinKey+R - Open the Run dialog
-- WinKey+Pause - Open the System Properties
-- WinKey+F - Find: All Files
-- WinKey+M - Minimize all open windows
-- WinKey+D - Show/Hide Desktop
-- WinKey+E - Open Windows Explorer
-- WinKey+F1 - Open windows help
I thought these were neat.
Dick Ingels
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Speed Surfing the Internet
I have my new cable modem and broadband router hooked up to my two computers and it is sweet. The speed is just incredible. No more fighting over phone lines. No more waiting two hours to download a Windows update. This is the life.
I have talked about getting broadband for quite some time. I just never got around to ordering it. The last time I got interested is when @Home went under, so I decided to wait until they sorted out the mess before signing up.
You may remember we had a presentation about cable internet a few months back. The man from Insight seemed to know what he was talking about and it looked like the company had everything figured out and was ready to go.
We looked at the deal the cable company was offering and decided it was time to go. By the time we looked at the cost of our ISP and a second phone line we pretty much broke even with broadband. Plus we got the additional speed.
We ordered the broadband package and upgraded our two TV sets to digital cable.
The installers came to our house on a Christmas Eve morning. They began by ripping out our old cable wiring and installing all new cable. (I guess the new digital signal is very picky about signal strength and quality.) They installed a three way splitter where the cable came into the crawl space and ran new cable to the two TVs and the cable modem.
The TVs each got a digital cable box. We got one new cable box and one old one. (You do not need to get digital cable to get a cable modem, but they give you an additional discount if you do. There was also deal for a second box at a discount.). They had a heck of a time getting the second cable box to work. (They had to replace it with a second old box.) Then they had the bonus package messed up. (We ordered the family pack and they gave us the movie pack.) But that’s another story.
The cable modem looks like a shark fin. It is from RCA. It has blinking lights to let you know it is working and just how busy the network traffic is in your area. You can hook the cable modem to your computer with an Ethernet cable or a USB cable. My computers have Ethernet cards so I chose the Ethernet option. (This is a faster connection and keeps my USB ports free for future use.)
The installer handed me my install disk and some cables and said adios.
I installed the software and fired up the connection. It worked perfectly the first time. It was fast and easy. The performance was fantastic. I downloaded the latest Windows updates to the computer using Windows Update. It was over 20MB of files so I started the load and got myself a cup of coffee. I barely had time to get a cup and get back and the download was done. Yowza!
My next challenge was to install a broadband router to allow me to hook up my second computer. I had looked at several routers and finally decided on the one from D-Link. I bought it mainly on the recommendation of a friend of mine who had one working at his house. (I figured that in the worst case I could get him to come over and help me to set mine up.)
The D-Link router is pretty cool. It has 4 auto-sensing 10/100MB ports and an uplink port to the cable modem. It also has a printer port to allow you to share a printer between the computers on your network without dedicating one of them to be the print server. The router has a built in firewall and is administered via a mini-web server built into the unit.
I plugged the router between the cable modem and the computer. Then I fired up the computer. The router uses a web page for administration. I logged in as the admin and began the setup process. The process was simple. I just followed the step-by-step instructions in the guide book.
I selected the option for the router to take on the MAC address of the computer. This effectively hid the router from my ISP. If I had used the MAC address of the router I would have just had to reset my MAC address at insight.
The computer worked the same as it had without the router in place. Everything seemed to be working well.
I logged onto the Insight web page and set up e-mail accounts for my entire family. The kids were especially excited to be somebody@somewhere rather than nobody@nowhere. The account setup was pretty simple. It was a little more difficult to set up MS outlook express for each of the accounts but the directions on the Insight web page were pretty straight forward.
I tested the accounts by sending emails back and forth between accounts. Everything seemed to be working well.
My next challenge was to hook up my second computer. I paced off 30 paces from the router to my second computer. It will be much shorter when I run it through the crawl space, but I needed to test it by running the long way through the house. I needed about 90 feet of cable.
I went to Lowes and looked for CAT 5 cable. I looked all over and couldn’t find any. I remembered seeing it in the aisle with the telephone equipment last summer, but there was none to be found. I then looked in the Electrical department and found a big contractor box with CAT 5 wire for about 22 cents a foot. This seemed high to me and I didn’t want to mess around finding a clerk so I just gave up on them.
Next, I went to Menards and purchased a 100 foot roll of CAT 5e network cable for about $12. I already had a cable crimper and network connectors that I purchased to fix cables that I use at work. I decided to just put connectors on the full 100 feet and cut it down to size later when I installed it permanently.
I crimped the connectors and plugged it into the router. Then I strung it out of the living room, through the kitchen, behind the sofa in the family room, under the rug, through the door of the exercise room and into my den. I plugged it into the computer and tried to get hooked up to the internet. It was dead. I was not a happy camper.
I cut off one of the cable ends and put on a new connector. I still had no response from the network. I cut off the other end of the cable and put on a new connector. Still no response. I was pretty discouraged at this point. I decided to reboot the computer. (Bill Gates has me trained pretty well.) This time the network connected and I was able to connect to insight.
Unfortunately I was not able to get out to the rest of the internet. I tried to figure out how to set up manually and was unable to get very far. I decided what the heck and put in the startup disk I used on the first computer. It ran through its little install and than reported that I was already set up on insight. I said OK, whatever and tried the internet again. Everything worked just fine.
I have had several close calls when the cable got caught in the door to the exercise room or the router fell on the floor because somebody tripped over the cable. I will get around to installing it some day, but for now I find it hard to find the time to crawl down into the dirty, cold crawl space when I could just as easily be surfing the web at warp speed.
After our last meeting I checked the firewall in the router on the Shields UP! web site. It does a pretty good job of hiding the computer from snoopers. The firewall provides stealth protection for all my ports except the ident. port. I am going to try to see if I can change the configuration to hid that one as well. I was very happy after I passed the test, because I do not run a local firewall on my computers.
I have had a great time with my broadband cable modem. I would highly recommend one to anyone else who can get the service. It is truly amazing. ( I can not even imagine how I survived going 14KB to Ron Shue’s old Bulletin Board System (BBS).)
Mark Pendergast
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Print Screen
Print Screen is alive and well on Windows. I was surprised that so few people know this trick at the last meeting.
Use the print-screen button to send the CRT screen to the Windows clipboard, then use Edit > Paste to paste it into any application like Word or PowerPoint.
Hold down ALT and press print-screen to capture just the active window on the clip board. We use this trick to make computer training manuals at work.
Mark Pendergast
Wacky Word Scramble Answers
1. PENTIUM
2. MICROSOFT
3. WINDOWS
4. KEYBOARD
5. MOUSE
6. MONITOR
7. MULTIMEDIA
8. INTERNET
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