Issue 120 - January 24, 2001

ISSN 1488-3163; PC Improvements ©2000
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Welcome to the 120th 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 January and win a copy of the book "The Unauthorized Guide to Windows ME" by Paul McFedries. The more you recommend PCIN the more chance you have to win. Recommend PCIN now at http://www.pcin.net/recommend.shtml

OPENING THOUGHTS

I've received a few responses regarding the summer PCIN get together, but I am still looking for more. If you live close enough to come to a summer BBQ or something like that, then please email me to let me know that you are interested. For those people interested, I'd also like to hear what you'd be interested in doing/discussing/seeing while hear. Email me at mailto:editor@pcin.net

Lisa and I got our house on Friday and have been working non-stop to try and get everything moved and setup. Everything has gone smoothly; just a lot of work. Thanks to everyone who has wished us well.

I will be moving my computer on Friday, so the computer where the Niagara Falls wallpaper is on will have a new IP address, so it may take a few days to get all of the DNS records updated. If you try to access the pictures over the next week and it isn't available, try again later.

Lastly, don't forget to recommend PCIN in the month of January and have a chance to win a copy of the book "The Unauthorized Guide to Windows ME" by Paul McFedries. Recommend PCIN now at http://www.pcin.net/recommend.shtml

The NEWS

Running out of IP Addresses

Whenever you are on the Internet, you have been assigned an IP address. This is a necessity. Any computer that uses the Internet actually becomes part of the Internet, and you must have an IP (Internet Protocol) address in order to do this. The problem is, this protocol (version 4) has been around for 20 years, and 20 years ago no one could have dreamed that we'd have so many devices that access the Internet. The current protocol supports 4 billion addresses, and it is projected that by 2005 the numbers will run out.
Since the early 90s, various organizations have been making proposals on how to fix this problem. The probable answer is version 6 of this protocol. It will allow for 340,232,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 IP addresses (340 duodecillion, or 34 trillion trillion trillion, or 3.4 x 10 to the power of 38). This is all pretty technical, but when (or if) it happens, it could affect all of us (since we all use IP addresses).

Spreading the Word

From the February 2001 issue of M-Business Magazine, pg 11:
"All over the media these days is the idea of using church steeples as cell phone antennas. Makes sense: There's at least one house of God in residential neighborhoods throughout Europe and North America, and lots of them are pointy on top.
The Church of England has written all of its parishes, asking them to consider concealing antennas in their belfries - for which the churches can expect $7,000 or more per year, according to London's Guardian newspaper.
However, uptake elsewhere is proving a bit tricky. A year ago, a church in San Francisco withdrew plans for cell antennas and its steeple (although other San Francisco Bay Area churches have, in true Silicon Valley style, welcomed antennas for cash). And cell phone protestors in Germany have sued local churches for hosting antennas.
If the church-tower trend does manage to catch on, cash-strapped local churches might have an easy source of income. If it fails, well, maybe it just wasn't meant to be.
by Dan Leide"

For more info:
http://www.ipv6.org/

Mafiaboy Pleads Guilty

"The 16-year-old Canadian hacker known only as Mafiaboy yesterday coughed to bringing down 50 big-name Web sites.
The servers hosting Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and many other high-profile sites were sent crashing early last year through massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.
By April, the FBI, the Department of Justice and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had tracked the attacker down to Quebec. The teenager goes by the hacker alias Mafiaboy. Under Canadian Law his real name cannot be made public. He was arrested on 15 April 2000, charged four days later then released on bail.
Yesterday, in a Montreal courtroom, Mafiaboy pleaded guilty to 50 counts of 'mischief to data'. Two counts, against CNN.com, were cited in last year's bail-setting trail. Sixty-six further counts were added to the list at a court hearing last August. However, ten of them, against a single site, @Law, were later dropped.
Mafiaboy is expected to be sentenced on 17 April. He faces up to two years in jail."

For more info:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/16211.html

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 119-01

I have some files on a CDRW that I wish to transfer to my hard drive. When I try to do so, I get a message that reads "unable to copy files. The device does not recognize the command"
I am using a Yamaha CRW 6416SZ SCSI 2 cd writer with and Adaptec AHA-2940 SCSI card.
I have done this exact type of file transfer before with no problems.
I took the disc to a friend's house and put it in his cd-rom and had no trouble copying the files at all. I have updated the CDRW driver, but not the SCSI card driver or the BIOS (not that brave yet).

A 119-01

Chaz said, "It is obvious, from your own words, that before your CDRW driver update, all worked fine. And added to this you mentioned you didn't update the SCSI card driver that controls the CDRW. My personal first attempt would be to uninstall the new driver, try again and see if it works normally again. If so, your new driver is the problem. This does not mean it is a bad driver. It just means that the new driver is doing its intended purpose but, something else (maybe old??) no longer can communicate with the new data. My next option would be to finish the full process of driver updates - do the SCSI card. It is like making something old to be new and still leaving something else (vital to the process) old behind to function, beyond its ability, as if it were new. Above all, if available, read the README file or other text files that come with the drivers. These will specify known incompatibilities of model/make and/or drivers and recommended solutions. Some issues require an "order" in which to install drivers (first to last).
The problem you described is not uncommon among certain make/model CDRom and CDRW drives which use Adaptec (and some others) SCSI instead of IDE/EIDE controlling. I have a Mitsumi that had done exactly what you described. It now works great."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John Hills said, "Many things could cause this but you need to establish whether you can still write to this device. If you have a CDROM as well, does copying it work from there? If you cannot write or read, then it could be the heads need cleaning, or failing that, try uninstalling the device and reinstalling it. It may also be simply broken. Sorry, not the most useful answer."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Needleman said, "Is it possible that Adaptec has the cd-rw locked?
It appears to me you may want to go into the Adaptec web site and download updates for that program.
Updating the Bios seems rather extreme.
Try reading the cd-rw through windows explorer. From there you should be able to "copy" files, etc. to any drive."

Q 119-02

How often should I run defrag?

A 119-02)

Chaz said, "Not knowing the amount of time you spend on your computer, your frequency of downloads, deletes, installs/uninstalls, word-processing, databasing, etc. I generally suggest a minimum of once a week - pick a day you use it less or not at all. You can manually set it to be done or have it automated according to any date and frequency of operation. This usually keeps fragmented percentages down very low (8-percent, give or take a couple for example). The "hardly ever used" computer could go once a month. If you run a business use it for servicing of any kind, etc, these are issues of great importance and could keep you making money or else costing you majorly. In a critical case as this, I defrag mine any chance I get before Shut Down.
Lastly, I highly recommend backing a Registry backup before you defrag. Reason is, you will make a known good Registry backup for a Rescue return should something happen after your defrag. It DOES happen. Power surge, spikes, power flickers, or even the Optimization of the drive itself, can play havoc and lock up your system. Should you ever experience this (hopefully you never will), you will have two possible ways to restore your Registry backup."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ken Berry said, "It depends on what you do on your computer and how much you use it. Clean all the Internet cache, temp folders, un-needed files, dump trash, run scandisk, restart the computer then defrag. Win 98 defrag is a little better than it's predecessors in that it looks at what programs run most often and can move those files to the front of the drive for quicker access.
Once a week is a good practice but if you want things really neat and tidy and your computer is routinely on when you're asleep, defrag every night as a scheduled task.
Don't forget to clean un-needed files beforehand though. If you don't you'll create big "holes" in your hard drive when these files are removed."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John Hills said, "If you are using Win, ME, or 2000, it isn't necessary as most files are stored reasonably neatly and not scattered so widely with earlier operating systems. If you are running out of hard disk space then defragging should help by giving windows swap file a reasonable free space to operate."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Simon Duffy said, "run defrag every day and watch the nice patterns...not. Depending on what you do and how much data you process from once a week to once a month. If your machine is struggling and opening a word document puts a strain on the hard drive then defrag otherwise don't worry much about it."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chuck said, "In my experience defrag does not seem to improve things if run when the hard drive is less than 5% fragmented. But, for those who want to keep their Hard Drive squeaky clean and at maximum efficiency, I recommend defragging whenever the hard drive is 'cleaned'. By cleaning I mean deleting .tmp files, emptying Cache or Temporary Internet Files, and uninstalling unused or undesired software. As a minimum, once a month should keep your hard drive tweaked."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Needleman said, "I recommend you defrag based on your usage.
That is, if you use your computer on a daily basis, using several programs, you may want to set the "task scheduler" to do an auto defrag once a week while you are sleeping.
Your system will open apps faster, etc."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
VJ said, "Only run defrag every 6-8 months, and please run it over overnight, because when you run defrag, you CANNOT use the computer at all!"

New Questions

Q 120-01

I checked the "Send E-Mail using plain text only" box in two addresses in my address book but if I click on a link to either of them in an e-mail then it still sends HTML messages. I have to manually change it for each message. Is there a way to change this? (Using Outlook Express 5)

Q 120-02

I have recently acquired a pc and wish to dump everything on it and fdisk it and reload win 98 on, but it does not boot the 'A' drive first. And I can't get in to the bios as it is password protected to change the bootable drive, is there a command I can enter to get it to read the start up disk, when I need to use the start up disk. Any suggestions?

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

Accessing Your CD-ROM from a Boot Disk

Subscriber Jon sent this to me. I tried it out myself and it works quite well.
"I do hereby submit this hint/cheat/crack/tip or whatever you want to call it:
Question: Have you ever reformatted your hard drive just to find out that you can't get your CD-ROM re-started so you can re-load windows?
Well my friend let me tell you, this has happened to me many times. Now here's the solution. "CODECRACKERS" CD-ROM restarter. Just run this program and it will restart most CD-ROMs built prior to 2001."
Although the name sounds a little ominous, it is just an EXE file that you download. When you run it, you need a floppy disk and it will make a bootdisk that will list dozens of CD-ROM drives for you to choose from. You can download this program at http://www2.driverguide.com/uploads/uploads8/9086.html

Symbols Used in Filenames

Since filenames in Windows can be up to 255 characters long, most people are finding themselves using more symbols in their filenames than they did in DOS days. A lot of the symbols could have been used in DOS, but with only 8 character filenames, most people didn't bother. Below are symbols that can be used in either DOS or Windows:

$     Dollar sign
%     Percent sign
'     Apostrophe or closing single quotation mark
`     Opening single quotation mark
-     Hyphen
@     At sign
{     Left brace
}     Right brace
~     Tilde
!     Exclamation point
#     Number sign
(     Left parenthesis
)     Right parenthesis
&     Ampersand
_     Underscore
^     Caret

Below are symbols that can be used in Windows only:

      Space
+     Plus sign
,     Comma
;     Semicolon
=     Equal sign
[     Opening bracket
]     Closing bracket

Delete Files Immediately

Well, I may have shared this tip before, but it's a good one.
One of the very nice features of Windows is that when you delete a file, it always goes to the Recycle Bin first. That way, when you realize that you have erased something you need, you can restore it.
You can, however, delete files without having them first go to the Recycle Bin. Before you delete, hold down the Shift key and then delete the file. Instead of being asked "Are you sure you want to send [filename] to the Recycle Bin?" you will be asked "Are you sure you want to delete [filename]?" If you agree to delete the file, it is gone. There are always ways to get files back, but it is very difficult. Only use this tip when deleting files that you are sure you won't need anymore.

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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