June 2003
Volume 21, Issue 6
Kokomo PC
Users Group
Presidents Message:
What wonderful spring weather. It is cold and overcast and just plain yucky. A perfect excuse for snuggling up to your computer and computing the day away.
We had a great meeting last month. Our Founding Father - Greg Ogle - gave an amazing demonstration of home networking. He showed us just how easy it is to share files and printers between two computers on an Ethernet connection. In fact he showed us how to share files through thin air with a pair of wireless Ethernet cards. Thank you to Greg for that fantastic presentation.
Our membership continues to decline in spite of our warm hospitality and engaging meetings. Please take a moment to invite a friend (or enemy for that mater) to one of our regular meetings. We offer first class presentations, good fellowship and an informative question and answer period. If they join our group they will also receive our wonderful newsletter, mailed directly to their home or office. A good users Group is the most important accessory you can buy for your computer.
If you have any tips or tricks for improving our enjoyment of our PCs, please write them up in a sort article for the newsletter. We would love to hear how clever you are and would like to learn your secrets. This is a great way to provide a service to the club. You can also earn User Bux for each full page of original text.
If you have a computer passion you would like to share with the Group, we would love to have you present it at one of our regular meetings. Some of our best presentations come from our own Group members talking about the programs and hardware they love. Just let one of the officers know that you would like to present and what topic you will be presenting. This is a great way to provide a service to the club. You can also earn User Bux for providing this service to the Group.
If you feel that you would like to become involved in the leadership of the group, please volunteer to be an officer. We are looking for warm bodies … I mean visionary leaders to participate in the leadership of the Group. Just contact one of the current officers and we will put you to work changing the destiny of the Group.
Mark Pendergast
Da Prez
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Word menu tricks
One of my least favorite new features in MS Word is the hidden menus that only show you the commands that you have used recently. If you want to see a command you haven’t used in a while, or ever, you need to hover over the double arrow at the bottom of the menu. This drives me crazy.
It is very simple to fix this problem. Just go to the main menu bar and select Tools > Customize... This will bring up the customize dialog box. The dialog box has three tabs. Select the Options tab. On the Options tab is a check box called ‘Always show full menus’. Just check this box and press the close button and your troubles will be over. The menus will always show every option - just like the good old days.
In my opinion, the Microsoft features designed to make the computer smarter than the user are a royal pain in the kiester. I have banned the paper clip guy from my desktop and have unset every feature I can find in my options and customize settings.
Mark Pendergast
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Word smart feature headaches
Another feature of MS Word that drives me crazy is auto-formatting bulleted lists. This feature sees that you are putting a sub-list of indented lines with a dash in the front and converts them to a formatted list. I hate this. I normally just want an indented list and not the fancy list. For example:
IBM PC Officers:
- President
- Vice President
- Treasurer
- Newsletter Editor
- Newsletter Distribution
- Members Services
Instead I get:
IBM PC Officers:
And no good way to get back where I want to go.
To fix this feature you need to go to the Main Menu and select Tools > Autocorrect Options… This will bring up the Autocorrect Options dialog. The Autocorrect Options dialog has five tabs. Select the ‘AutoFormat as you type tab’. On this tab you will see a checkbox labeled ‘Automatic bulleted lists’. Just check this box and press the OK button and your troubles will be over. Your simple bulleted lists will not be transformed into smart bulleted lists without your approval.
The Autocorrect Options dialog has control of many other annoying features of MS Word. Just hunt around for a while and I am sure you will find something that is annoying you.
Mark Pendergast
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The Joys of an old computer
My son and I have had some fun this past weekend with an old computer I bought at a Garage Sale last year.
As I recall I bought two computers and a whole box of computer boards for $10. It seemed like a good investment at the time. I have always wanted to get more experienced working with computer hardware, but could never bring myself to experiment on my main system. It also seemed like it could be an interesting way to share some quality time with my son. Well we both got busy and the two computers and the box of boards ended up on a shelf in the garage.
Out of the blue my son asked me if we could try to get the two computers I had in the garage working. I figured that it would be a good activity and might actually teach him something.
I went out to the Garage and got the box of cards down off the top shelf. I grabbed the first computer and as I got ready to take it into the house noticed that it was a little light. When I looked inside it was almost empty. There was a chassis with two floppy drives and nothing else. No Motherboard, no power supply, no wires no nothing. Well, strike one.
I went to get the second computer. It was reassuringly heavy. I brought it into the house and we set it up in the guest room. I got an old monitor from another computer I bought earlier and found a mouse and a keyboard. I also had to find some power cords for the computer and monitor. Fortunately for me I have four active computers and two in hibernation, plus the two from the garage. Welcome to spare parts heaven.
My son and I wired the whole thing up and turned on the power. The fan came on and the computer started the power on self test (POST) sequence. When it go to the end it whirred a little more and then said "FD controller error", "HD controller error.".
Well this was a minor setback on the road to computer bliss. I decided to get a screwdriver and open the case. After my experience with the first computer I was ready for anything.
When I got the case cover off and looked around it seemed that all the major parts were in place. The wires from the motherboard to the front of the case were just a jumble. Only one of the buttons was connected - it seemed to be the reset button. Everything else was just hanging loose. This explained why the speaker didn’t work. (No POST beep.)
Well, I just wiggled the ribbon cable connectors on the drive controller and on the drive and blew out any dust I found. Then we tried to fire it up again. This time we left the cover off. The computer booted up and displayed the C: prompt. Cool!
I did a DIR and up came the list of the C drive directories - DOS and WINDOWS. Not much to choose from, but it was a start. I dug back into the depths of my memory and found the magic words to make the exciting stuff happen. I typed WIN at the C prompt. The computer started pounding on the hard drive and lo and behold - up popped the Windows 3.11 logo screeen and then the Windows 3.11 desktop.
I felt like I was in a time warp. It has been many years since I wandered around in that interface. I grabbed the mouse and tried to check out the system. The pointer would not move. I plugged and un-plugged. I wiggled and waggled the interface card. No such luck.
I used keyboard commands to get out of Windows. (Alt-F-X-enter)
At the C prompt I edited the config.sys file. It looked pretty boring and no mouse driver. I also looked in the autoexec.bat file. Almost empty and also no mouse anything. The next stop was the DOS directory. Sorry no mouse stuff there either.
I went to my den and rummaged around for a while until I found my old DOS books. I flipped through some of them hoping for some mouse setup information, but didn’t find anything that would help.
Well, It looked like we would have to be happy with command line DOS for a while.
I went to my den and rummaged around for a while until I found my old box of DOS disks. I had several games and some system disks as well as some games I had written myself in Quick Basic and compiled for my son. Those brought back old memories.
My son and I started looking through the disks. We found a disk called Big Blue disk. It was a disk based magazine of freeware, shareware and demos. This one had a version of the solitaire game Klondike that you could play from the keyboard. I had about four of them with various programs on them.
I found some programs I downloaded from the old PC Users Group BBS. There was one called Artic that I remember was a lot of fun, but the files were corrupted on the disk and I could not run them.
I finally found what looked to be a boot disk of some sort. It had mouse.sys and a config.sys file that showed how to load it. I copied the mouse file to the hard drive and updated the config.sys file with the correct lines to load it. We rebooted the computer and when it came back up it was almost laughing as it said: "FD controller error", "HD controller error".
Oh well, back to the drawing board. We wiggled all the cards and rebooted. No luck - same failure message. At that point I gave up. My son decided to keep trying to wiggle cables and cards. A while later he came to me and said it was working again.
We have not gotten the mouse to work correctly. I suspect the serial port is bad. I really do not have a good way to test it. I guess I could hook up a modem and see if I can make the lights flash or something. Once again we gave up and went back to keyboard driven DOS.
My son loaded some of the games I made for him as a kid. They are all very simple, but he enjoyed them at the time.
The first one drew a color picture of Thomas the tank engine. Well, Thomas was actually white and the screen background was the color, but what do you want. Whenever a key is pressed the background color changes and Thomas gets bigger or smaller.
There was also a program that prints out a full line of whatever character you press.
My son had the opportunity to relive some of his early childhood. He seemed to enjoy this trip down memory lane.
We found several other DOS games and he tried them out. Most recently he found a soccer game that I got free with something else.
I guess our next step will be to try swapping in some of the other cards from the spare parts box into the computer and see if they do any better than the set we have in there now.
I am not sure how long my son’s interest in the old computer will last, but as long as it does I am sure we will have fun working on it together.
Mark Pendergast
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Thanks to Ivy Tech
A big thanks to Ivy Tech for hosting our group for all these years. In spite of some tight schedules they have always managed to find us a spot to meet. Please do your part and sign up for a summer session class to show our support.
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