Issue 123 - February 14, 2001

ISSN 1488-3163; PC Improvements ©2001
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Welcome to the 123rd issue of the PC Improvement News. PCIN consists of news, tips, thoughts, and contests. There is something for everyone, and if this is your first issue, I'm sure there will be something for you. I am willing to discuss any computer topic. Email me at mailto:editor@pcin.net with any suggestions. If you give me two or three issues, I know that you will come back for more!

Recommend PCIN to others and be entered in a monthly draw. Recommend PCIN in February and win a copy of Serif 3Dplus and PrintMaster 7.2. The more you recommend PCIN the more chances you have to win. Recommend PCIN now at http://www.pcin.net/recommend.shtml

OPENING THOUGHTS

First off, I hope you all had a happy Valentines Day. Lisa and I didn't do much (seeing as we just bought a house), but we did go out for lunch together.

Tomorrow I will be going to a Microsoft event called "Licensed to Sell" near Toronto. It is mainly for resellers, but anyone could register. It's the first official Microsoft event I will have been to, so it will be interesting to see what it is like.

Don't forget about the tentative PCIN summer. If you live close enough and are interested, then please email me to let me know that you are interested. I'd also like to hear what you'd be interested in doing/discussing/seeing while here. Email me at mailto:editor@pcin.net

Lastly, don't forget to recommend PCIN in February and win a copy of Serif 3Dplus and PrintMaster 7.2. Recommend PCIN now at http://www.pcin.net/recommend.shtml

The NEWS

A Profitable DotCom

Las Thursday Chris Empey (friend, co-worker, and subscriber) and I went to InternetWorld in Toronto. We traveled about 1.5 hours to get there, and spent about 30 minutes at the show. It must have been 1/5 the size it was last year. I guess all of these DotCom failures have affected the trade shows.
There is at least one company however who is bucking the trend. "Register.com (RCOM), the No. 2 reseller of Internet domain names, on Thursday posted fourth quarter net income of 6 cents per share as the company reached profitability, sending its shares soaring over 25 percent in after-hour dealings."

For more info:
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010208/18/net-registerdotcom-earns-dc

An Unprofitable DotCom

For almost the two and a half years I've been writing PCIN I've been complaining about Amazon.com and how I don't understand why they are still in business and expanding when they are losing money.
Well, they've finally listened to me :-)
"In June, just seven months ago, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos confidently addressed a full auditorium at PC Expo, the annual computer hardware trade show. 'Our goal is to provide our 20 million users with 20 million different stores,' he said, showing off his company's latest innovation in personalization technology. 'Our primary motive is to provide universal selection and be the one place where people can find anything they want to buy.'
But Bezos was crooning a different tune in a companywide e-mail sent Feb. 1. Titled 'Get the Crap Out,' the memo lacked the stale rhetoric of growth-before-profits he has spouted for the past five years. Rather, it spelled out a plan to 'ferociously manage the products we carry' by eliminating unprofitable ones and slashing distribution costs.
A day earlier, Amazon eliminated 1,300 jobs -- 15% of its workforce -- in the retail giant's biggest layoff ever and closed a two-year-old distribution center in Georgia and a 400-person customer-service center in its home-base city of Seattle. The company's original distribution center, also in Seattle, will be one of seven remaining physical facilities but will operate only during peak holiday seasons."

For more info:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/feb2001/nf2001027_279.htm

At Tampa's Turnstiles, Crowd Wasn't Faceless

"Super Bowl fans never knew it, but police video cameras focused on their faces, one by one, as they streamed through the turnstiles in Tampa on Sunday. Cables instantly carried the images to computers, which spent less than a second comparing them with thousands of digital portraits of known criminals and suspected terrorists.
In a control booth deep inside the stadium, police watched and waited for a match.
The extraordinary test of technology during the highest-profile US sporting event of the year yielded one hit, a ticket scalper who vanished into the crowd, reported an official at the company that installed the cameras.
But the decision to scan the unwitting crowd at the Super Bowl and countless visitors to the popular entertainment district of Ybor City for days before the big game inspired support and opposition Wednesday over the nature of the technology and its intended uses."

For more info:
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/161343.html

The Napster Case

I'm sure you've all heard about this and what the decision of the Appellate Court was, but if not, here are some articles about it:

LIFE AFTER NAPSTER
http://www.nypost.com/technology/23749.htm
Napster Ruling Irks Students
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/02/13/BU39375.DTL
Music swapping won't end with ruling
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/newman13_20010213.htm
Victory or defeat?
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/02/12/napster_reactions/index.html
Bertelsmann Sees Free Online Music Services Dying
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010213/09/net-napster-bertelsmann-dc
TIME TO TELL 'EM WHICH SIDE YOU'RE ON
http://www.nypost.com/technology/23744.htm
Napster May Pay Dearly for This
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41757,00.html
Musicians Play a Hopeful Tune
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,41770,00.html
Congress Sits Back and Listens
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41766,00.html
Napster ruling angers fans, pleases artists
http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20010213/3062376s.htm
Napster rivals see opportunity in court ruling
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/02/13/010213hnnapriv.xml

MOBILE COMPUTING NEWS AND NOTES

Some concept phones that support 3G connections and have larger screens are able to play full color Internet games like Quake. Audio and video clips can also be downloaded wirelessly on concept phones, but can be done on PocketPCs already. http://www.pvairguide.com/ is one place where you can try it out.

Brought to you by The Wireless Web ezine. Sign up by sending a blank email to mailto:wirelessweb-subscribe@topica.com

I NEED HELP

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 most of them, but there are things that I have never tried or experienced so I don't have an answer. I post those questions here and see if any of the readers have any suggestions. I will include all reasonable suggestions with credit to you.
These are NOT my own questions and they are NOT my answers. I will NOT check the validity of these comments. That is up to you. If you do try one of these tips, please let me know how the suggestions worked out. Did they work or not? Please send in your questions or results to mailto:freehelp@pcin.net

Previous Questions

Q 122-01

Is there any way to use a USB mouse in DOS?

A 122-01

John Hills said, "To my knowledge no. Even windows cannot pick up the mouse until the USB drivers are loaded."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
** said, "I don't see why not, you can use a USB keyboard under DOS (a setting in the BIOS). But in order to use it you _will_ have to get drivers for it. I suggest you go to the home site of the company who made your mouse (if you don't know this site go to a search page and search for the companies name). You may also have to enable USB keyboard in the BIOS to use the mouse. But the companies site will tell you whether or not use can do this and if so how."

Q 122-02

I am told I have bad sectors in my hard disk at the end of one partition. What should I do to stop them increasing or affecting my data?

A 122-02)

John Hills said, "Repartition your hard drive and make your drive D partition big enough to hold the bad sector area and then avoid using that drive. That may hold them for some time. However, bad sectors are normally an early sign of hard drive failure so I would back up your data just in case. Certainly you can expect more bad sectors to appear over time. I strongly recommend you go for a new one while you can."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
George Kevorkian said, "Probably won't help in keeping he bad sectors increasing, but making a backup of the disk & reformatting will block out existing bad sectors. Then, restore the data to the disk.
I believe that a disk defragmenter also marks off bad sectors to make them unavailable for use, but check that out."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
** said, "Bad sectors developing, especially in old hard drives, can indicate impending hard drive failure.
I suggest you exit from windows by doing the shutdown procedure, but at the end instead of choosing to shutdown choose 'restart in MS-DOS mode'. Once the computer has done its thing you should see a 'c:\' with a flashing cursor next to it. Here type 'scandisk c:' if c is the faulty drive, otherwise replace the c as appropriate. This is the most reliable way to scan your hard drive, and all bad sectors will be marked, stopping your computer from using them, automatically!
The more you use your computer the more you should do this to protect your self, i would say at least once a month till you're sure they are not increasing.
Unfortunately you cannot stop them from increasing, only minimize their impact on your data. Make sure _any_ data you cant replace is backed up!"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Simon Duffy said, "Replace your disk before you lose all your data. Make sure first by fdisking and reformatting. If while formatting "looking for lost allocation units appears" it is bad if it formats okay the run scandisk to see your bad sectors. If there are none there, okay, no problem. If there are, then bad news new disk."

New Questions

Q 123-01

I recently got myself a DVD drive for my computer. I have read\seen about such devices that covert the signal from a video card and connect to your TV. That's what I'm interested in. Any recommendations?

Q 123-02

This may not be enough information, but here goes. I run Windows 98 on a custom built computer. The computer has an Athlon 500 chip, a Voodoo3 video card, Internet Explorer through Mindspring, 128K RAM. The system regularly freezes, especially when I am on the Internet. I expect it to freeze periodically, but this computer freezes too much. Any advice?

If you have an answer to these questions or have a question of your own, please email me at mailto:freehelp@pcin.net

THE TIPS and OTHER STUFF

Cheap Trick of the Week

**Site lines**
Windows 98 and Windows Me let you keep a folder of Favorite sites on the Start menu, but even without this you can place a quick link to your favourite Web site by itself on your Start menu.
Go to Settings on your Start menu and open Taskbar (also called Taskbar & Start Menu). Click on the StartMenu tab and on the Add button. Then type in the Internet address, such as www.we-compute.com.
Hit Next and then choose where you want it located - for instance, highlight Start Menu if you want it there. Hit Next again and now give it a name. Click on Finish and on OK.
Now, whenever you click on the name you gave the site on your Start menu, it will open your Web browser and prepare to go to the site.

Get your own copy of "The Little Black Book of Cheap Tricks: 2001" by visiting http://www.pcin.net/lbbct

The Broadband Experts Handbook

The February issue of Maximum PC had a lengthy section called the "Broadband Experts Handbook." It explained the difference between DSL and Cable services, the cost of these services, the top ISPs, and some good suggestions for what you can do with all of that broadband.
They also had a list of links for sites that have resources for broadband users. The MaximumPC.com site does not have their issues available online, so here are those links:
DSL Reports
http://www.dlsreports.com/
The Cable Modem Information Network
http://www.cable-modem.net/
SpeedGuide.net - PC Performance Resources
http://www.speedguide.net/
Covad
http://www.covad.com/
How Things Work - articles about broadband connections
http://www.howthingswork.com/cable-modem.htm
http://www.howthingswork.com/dsl.htm

Cheap Trick Newsletter

The Cheap Trick of the Week above is sent to me from WE Compute! Magazine. They also have a free newsletter called WEMail sent out every week that has:
FREEBIE OF THE WEEK
CHEAP TRICK OF THE WEEK (different than the one I use each week)
TWEAK OF THE WEEK
NEWS YOU CAN USE
You can subscriber by going to http://www.we-compute.com/newsletter.html

DISCLAIMER and OTHER STUFF

PCIN 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 for the results obtained from trying the tips in this newsletter.

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