Please bring your problems/questions for our Q & A session. If possible, send them ahead of time to one of our officers for a little advance research. Answers to unasked questions are often useful when they concern problems of general interest.

The chapter opened a discussion on "Computer Assembly" at the July meeting. Some members brought their computer cases, and these were opened so members not familiar with the interior of a computer could see how one is assembled. Components were passed around for members to see and handle while their functions were described. Jim started with the motherboard and showed how cards are added for sound, video, modem, scanner, and other specialty functions. A collection of cables (IDE, floppies, serial, parallel, SCSI, and others) were connected and their pin styles, male and female, were shown. Installation of floppy and hard drives was discussed to familiarize PC users with upgrading their system. Addition of memory (single in-line memory modules, or SIMMs) was done to show the ease of that upgrade operation.

A question and answer period followed. One of the problems was related to the loss of sound when using DialPad, a free Internet phone program. The program worked well with an ADSL connection, but soon failed to receive voice communication from the called party. While we were unable to solve the problem, a solution was found at the main SPCUG meeting in Sacramento. It turned out that installation of a firewall program was the problem, preventing full-duplex communication.