The PC Improvement News
Issue 1-32
May 19, 1999
ISSN 1488-3163
Published electronically by PC Improvements (c) 1999
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Welcome to the 32nd edition of the PC Improvement News. In
this newsletter,
I have a couple of tips to make your computing life easier
as well as
highlights of the past weeks PC Industry News. I am more than
willing to
discuss any PC related topics in this newsletter. Just email
me at
editor@pcin.net with
your suggestions. I would also appreciate it
if you let me know if there is any strange formatting in the
newsletter so
that I can fix them.
Give me two or three issues, and I know that you will get
something great
out of this!
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SOME OPENING THOUGHTS
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None
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THOUGHT OF THE WEEK
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"The book you don't read won't help."
-
Jim Rohn
Thought courtesy of http://www.HappyPublishing.com/
To subscribe to the FREE "Aspire to Something Higher" Thought-Of
The Day,
send a blank email to HappyQuotes-subscribe@listbot.com
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THE NEWS
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No Regulation of the Internet in Canada
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After about 10 months of meetings, the Canadian Radio-television
and
Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has decided that no regulation
of the
Internet is needed. They said that Canada is well represented
on the
Internet and the healthy competition on these sites allows
for them to be
successful. This is one of the first announcements from a
country on
Internet regulation.
For more info:
http://www.news.com/News/Item/Textonly/0,25,36636,00.html
Internet Filtering
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In a similar story, the US Senate voted unanimously to "encourage"
ISPs to
offer a filtering service. The filtering services are supposed
to filter
out objectionable words. Senator Orrin Hatch said that the
amendment "is
largely aimed at limiting the negative impact violence and
indecent
material on the Internet have on children." This is a
great step, but I'm
not sure how binding the "encouragement" will be.
For more info:
http://www.cnnfn.com/digitaljam/newsbytes/130610.html
Web Site Names UK Spies
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In a story that sounds like it is out of the next James Bond
movie, a web
site posted the names of some of Britain's top spies. This
raised
questions of who posted the names and were the spies' lives
in jeopardy.
The site was located in the US, so this also raised the question
of does
the UK government has the authority to shut down a web site
in another
country. As it turned out, the web site was shut down. I don't
know much
more about the site, as the URL wasn't published (obviously).
I don't know
if this was a personal site or the site of some radical activist
group.
For more info:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/990512-000022.html
Cyber Trial of the Century
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The judge presiding over this case has suggested to the participants
that
they should just let the computer makers decide what software
on their
computers. It is such a simple solution, but I guess lawyers
aren't
allowed to come up with answers that are simple like that.
This doesn't
mean it will happen, but it seemed to say that the Judge was
kind of
agreeing with the DOJ, but that does not want to severely
reprimand
Microsoft.
For information on the Microsoft vs DOJ trial, visit:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/special/msdojtrial.html
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I NEED HELP
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As many of you know, I offer a free help service via email.
If you have a
question, you can email me and I will try my best to answer
them. I can
answer about half of them. Those are things that I do regularly
or have
experience with. There are other things that I have never
tired or
experienced so I don't have an answer. I hope to post those
questions here
and see if any of the readers have any suggestions. I will
include all
reasonable suggestions with credit to you. I will not check
the validity of
these comments. That is up to you.
Previous Questions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
None (This is the first week).
New Questions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Q1) I know that Windows has startup and shutdown screens that
are bitmap
images. Does anyone know of a way to just input text and have
it converted
into one of those bitmaps so that it will appear in one of
the
startup/shutdown screens?
Q2) I want to download movies but it will not let me. I tried
save target
as and it worked for awhile but now it stops down loading
about 1 to 5
minutes after it starts. HELP. It happens on every site.
If you have any answers to these questions, please email
me at
mailto:freehelp@pcimprovements.com
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THE TIPS and OTHER STUFF
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What to do when your hard drive crashes
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This is a question that a lot of people have. Sometimes your
hard drive
can still work, but it appears that you have lost everything.
Up until
recently, the only solution was to send your hard drive to
a data recovery
shop and pay hundreds of dollars for them to try to fix it.
Well, thanks
to PowerQuest at http://www.powerquest.com/
we now have a much more
affordable solution. They have a product called Lost and Found
that for
about $40 will help you retrieve your data. I recently had
a nice email
from Justin Peer who had a problem with his hard drive and
had purchase
Lost and Found.
"It is absolutely amazing. After everything else (Norton
Utilities etc)
failed to be able to even read the disk, this software trundled
through
and recovered every file I had lost. I was stunned.
Nobody had even mentioned this software from the 24-hour
support
newsgroup, which suggests it's not that well known. With the
number of
hard drive problems that this group sees, I've posted a note
to this
effect for everyone's interest.
The only thing that you need to have, is something else to
write your
recovered data to, as you can't write to another partition
on the drive
you are recovering from. You could use a diskette, if you
have a few
thousand of them lying around, but I used my zip drive. When
I phoned
Iomega to figure out how to run the zip under dos, they knew
about Lost
and Found and rated it highly.
I have since discovered that you can download a demo of this
software from
the PowerQuest web site. The demo will not recover your files,
but will do
all the analysis to tell you what the program will be able
to recover.
Sounds like a good deal. The software comes on just two diskettes
and runs
under Dos.
Hopefully this might help you to help someone else who is
sitting there
with their head in their hands, just as I was a week ago."
Thanks Justin. Hopefully this will help someone.
New Icons for your URL
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If you are using IE5 and clicked on the link for the NBC story
about the
Microsoft case, you will notice that in the address bar there
is a small
icon that looks like the NBC peacock instead of the original
IE icon. How
did this happen? This is one of the new features of IE5. You
can have an
icon located in the same folder as your web page called favicon.ico
that
will replace the old icon. You can use a 16-colour icon that
is 16x16. I
plan on making one soon and it might be a good idea for you
to as well as
it might help your web site stick out of a collection of favorites.
Remember that this icon can only be seen in IE5.
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Lastly, send in your comments, tips and news and you too can
be included in
The PC Improvement News with a reference to your name and
web site.
Send email to pcinews@pcimprovements.com
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Well, that's all for this week. Remember that if there is
anything that you
want to learn about, let me know and I will try to accommodate
you. Also,
feel free to send any comments about the newsletters and the
topics covered.
This newsletter is sent to those who subscribed only. We don't
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The PC Improvement News is brought to you by PC Improvements.
The opinions
expressed are those of the editor, Graham Wing. PC Improvements
and Graham
Wing accept no responsibility (either good or bad) for the
results obtained
from trying the tips in this newsletter.
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Editor: Graham Wing can be reached at editor@pcin.net
Copyright 1999, PC Improvements and Graham Wing. All rights
reserved.
This publication may be reproduced in whole, or in part, as
long as the
editor is notified.