Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can interact with the team via chat room or BBS at www.thepcgurus.com. There are usually members present in the chat room after 8:00 PM every evening and you can post computer questions, comments, rants etc. on the bulletin board 24/7.
If you’re new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin’s website at http://www.jpdurbin.net. There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.
The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
2-10-05
My first real computer,
purchased in 1990, was a 386 SX/16 (16 MHz and the SX meant it had no math
coprocessor) with 1 MB of RAM and an astonishing 40 MB hard drive. No modem, so sound card, no CD-ROM but
it did have a 5 ¼” 1.2 MB floppy drive as well as the newest 3 ½” 1.44 MB
floppy. At the time it was a real
screamer. It even sported a 13.9”
monitor that could display 256 colors!
Whoo hoo!
Way back then the Internet was just a fledgling network made up mostly of University research facilities and the military, but 1990 marked the official end of ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet) and the beginning of a fully public system.
Since the ‘Net was so obscure at the time no OS had built in support. To get online you needed additional software that included a DUN component (Dial Up Networking). In 1993 the Internet became freely available in the Madison area through the Rural Datafication Project and I bought a package called Internet in a Box, which included the DUN, a browser, email client and other utilities with nifty names like Gopher and Archie.
With the advent of Windows 95 you had everything you needed to connect to the Internet, including a free downloadable but primitive version of Internet Explorer. This is the method to my madness this week.
The DUN has evolved into a more generic TCP/IP protocol that covers dial-up, broadband and even home networks and comes included with every OS from Linux to Mac to Windows. This allows you to connect to almost any network in existence and you already have it, so why would you want to replace it with something tied to only one network?
Many of the questions we receive each week concern connection, browsing or email problems related to AOL, MSN, NetZero or other proprietary software and the easy answer to most of them is go back to your native client.
In essence, if you connect through a service that requires you to install additional software you are supplanting the open standards networking components written specifically for your operating system with ones that are closed and try to encompass every version of the OS possible. This adds another layer of complexity to something that is already pretty complicated and the fact that users have problems with it doesn’t surprise me in the least.
This is not a slam on these providers, merely a statement of fact that they can and do cause problems by replacing core components with proprietary versions, which may conflict with other programs that access the Internet. Plus many of these providers bundle a ton of unwanted junk in with their main components.
AOL, for instance, bundles in AOL IM (a stand alone program) and RealPlayer, which will take over all of your multimedia files and has its own set of issues.
I’m not suggesting you go out and cancel your accounts immediately. It’s not nearly that large a problem, but the next time you have to format or otherwise restore your system, or when a yearly ISP contract comes up, you might want to consider switching over to a straight ISP and unload some of the additional baggage from your PC.
Happy computing…
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Microsoft
purchased Sybari Software this week, a maker of server-side
protection
products for e-mail. Is Redmond aiming to be THE name
in
anti-virus/anti-spyware software for both business and home
users?
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2005/tc2005029_8168_tc119.htm?chan=db
Speaking
of anti-virus software, Symantec (the maker of Norton's) has
announced a
security flaw in some older versions of its products:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5569811.html
Because
we know you can't get enough of patching your Windows machine,
Microsoft
released 12 patches this week:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119616,00.asp
And
finally, that gentle Butler of All Things Searchable has joined
the blogging
war:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,66536,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5
Copy
us on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.opaquelucidity.com
A few weeks ago I featured the Netcraft Toolbar to aid in alerting users to spoofed web sites, but unfortunately it’s only for Internet Explorer running on Windows 2000 and XP.
If you’re a Firefox fan you now have access to a very similar tool, which displays domain information for every website you visit. It’s called SpoofStick and is available for free from http://www.corestreet.com/spoofstick/firefox.html.
Harish Venkatachalam (affectionately known as Hash) is our resident Mac expert. He actually joined the team by submitting newsletter articles before any of us even knew who he was, and over time he’s proven that he’s highly intelligent, articulate and probably the best writer we have here at Newsletter Central.
From http://www.thepcgurus.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=1#hash:
“Hash is a Senior Process Engineer at Atofina Chemicals Inc., in Carrollton, KY.
A Chemical Engineer by trade, Hash's first foray into computers was trying to write assembler code to multiply two 16 digit numbers on an Intel 8085 processor. "I think back how incredibly frustrating those weeks were for me (in college) and am truly amazed at how far we have come today in the world of computers."
Hash is the team's Mac addict and loves OSX. He also loves Open Source and occasionally rants about the evils of Microsoft domination.
Hash is the Captain of the Carroll County Rescue Squad and is a volunteer EMT on the Carroll County EMS service. He is currently in Paramedic school and hopes to be one of the few volunteer paramedics in Kentucky.”
Q: I have an older PC running an AMD K-6
500Mhz, 256MB Ram, Award
Software Ver 4.51PG BIOS 09/03/98, Windows 98 SE. I
recently installed
Systemworks Premier 2005 including Norton Ghost and Norton
GoBack.
Since then I have encountered system stability problems. Is this
too
much "overhead" for this machine? If so, what should I uninstall?
Any
other recommendations for this machine, since it suits my
computing
needs well? Thanks!
A: First, if a machine does what you need
it to do, and you make
frequent backups of your important data to some sort
of removable
media, you don't need to replace the machine. Many
corporations
replace their PCs every two to three years but if everything
works
that's a needless expense.
As far as recommendations, if it says
Norton on it you should
uninstall it. The only worthwhile program in
the bunch is Ghost and
that's best run from bootable diskettes.
This is going
to sound harsh, but Norton stuff is extremely hard
to uninstall entirely and
you may be better served to back up all of
your important data to CD or
something and then reload the machine
from scratch. Load all the
drivers and essential programs, do all
your updates and make sure everything
is working properly, then boot
from the Ghost disks and make an image of your
perfect load.
Burn that image to a CD and put it away. From that
point on you
can make a new image once a month or so according to your
schedule.
If something catastrophic happens like a hard drive failure or a
nasty
virus infection just boot from the Ghost disks and restore the
most
recent image. It's like a format and reload and only takes
five
minutes or so.
As I said, harsh. If it's out of the
question go ahead and
uninstall Norton everything and use the machine for a
few days to see
if the stability returns. If so, make a Ghost image
like I mentioned
above and you can always go back to this point.
As a
last point, this is completely different than using something
like
GoBack. That program doesn't make a complete image, just a
snapshot of
the system that depends on the existing files and the hard
drive to be intact
and undamaged for you to use it. Real backup
programs allow you to
restore regardless of hardware and software
condition.
Hope that helps
and keep us posted :)
Kevin Mefford
pcguru@microdome.net
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