Tim started by making the very important announcement that the Editorship of Sacra Blue has been picked up by Brian Smither, who also volunteers as the group's Secretary, Webmaster, and AnswerGuy. He continued by thanking Tom Anderson and Ken Hopkins, the outgoing editors, praising them for a job well done.

Remember that the current and immediate past issues are password protected. Still, research indicates that hundreds, if not thousands of individuals download Sacra Blue. True, the number of downloads of the password protected issues do not break the 100 mark, but once open to the public, the download rate soars. Writers are needed for articles and columns – come join our team of authors and get your name in print!

However, discussion has been re-opened concerning the consequences that restricted access may have on our ability to attract advertisers. Advertisements are generally time sensitive, meaning two month old ads have somewhat reduced value and end up being as good as a Yellow Pages ad – which may or may not be the intent of the advertiser.

If you have any thoughts on the password issue as it pertains to any aspect of the group's operation other than Sacra Blue being a tangible benefit of membership, please come to the Steering Committee meetings or send a letter to the Editor.

According to Don Frieze, the group's Treasurer, Tim reports that our financial situation is nothing to be concerned about. The massive expense of printing and mailing hardcopies of Sacra Blue had been eliminated quite awhile ago, and so our budget has finally stabilized and is now very predictable.

Tim invited Mike Zellmer, the group's Membership Director, to the microphone. Mike reminded everyone that having current e-mail addresses is very important. For new members, obtaining your password to Sacra Blue is by e-mail and for current members, receiving reminder notices of upcoming meetings.

Tim announced that, as we have in the past, SPCUG will fund two scholarships at $500 each. These awards are available to any Sacramento valley area high school graduate planning to attend any accredited college. Scholarship Chairman Don Mongeau will have this year's application on our Web site within a few weeks. Be sure to tell family and friends of the availability of these awards.

Ken Hopkins made a rundown of future meetings. Milt is begging and pleading COMDEX presenters to consider presenting their products or services at a future SPCUG meeting. For December, we have no solid commitments. Milt's presentation of Wi-Fi technology, which has been pushed back several times, may finally see the light of day. PowerQuest will show the latest versions of their titles in April.

Ken also reminded the membership of the group's "listserv." A listserv is a means by which one can e-mail to a group of other subscribed individuals. These others, which can number into the hundreds and thousands, receive your e-mail who then can reply with further comments or solutions. The amount of traffic on SPCUG's listserv isn't that great at the moment – we provide it as a service to our members as an avenue for general conversation and advice.

Tim made an announcement on behalf of Compu-Mentor, an organization out of San Fransisco that support small non-profits. On December 7^th, Compu-Mentor will have a "Security Day" in Sacramento at Heald College (Prospect Park in Rancho Cordova, 9am-5pm, free participation). They need volunteers to take a four-hour training session to learn how to install anti-virus software, then travel to this area's Compu-Mentor non-profit clients and install that software. If you are interested, visit www.compumentor.org and see what they are all about.

Q&A
Q. With McAfee's virus scan, their latest scan engine prevents my systems from completely booting. Specifically, the Boot Sector scan is where the machine hangs.

A. Perhaps you should create a McAfee emergency boot diskette set with the latest virus definitions and make sure there is no boot sector virus preventing McAfee from completing its scans. You may have been advised to change a setting from "bootscan" to "scanpm". However, since Windows has yet to load any memory management software, what you may run into is a "Not enough memory" error because your machine is working under the 640K DOS memory model.

The boot sector of a hard drive is a favorite place for viruses to hide. Once installed in the boot sector, a virus is assured to be started before any other program on the hard drive gets a chance to kill it. The best a virus scanner can do is detect the virus, rarely be able to neutralize it, and the virus could possibly interfere with the scanner's functioning. You need to boot the computer from some source other than the hard drive.

The latest scanning engine may indeed have a problem with other drivers or background programs that are getting installed at the same time. For now, turn off the boot sector scan and wait for a new engine or some other fix from McAfee. In the meantime, be sure to scan the hard drive from a write-protected, bootable floppy.

If your decision is to go with another anti-virus product, after Thanksgiving, you will probably be able to buy any product with enough rebates to effectively make the product free.

Q. In WinXP, my word processor's spell checking window has words layered on top of each other, that is, several words are occupying the same space on the screen.

A. Obviously, some system file is corrupted. Run the System File Checker. We've never seen this problem and have no concrete answers for you.

Q. Recently, the sound from my computer has become scratchy. It's not the speakers or speaker wire since headphones sound just as bad. The problem was intermittent awhile ago but is now permanent.

A. Since your sound circuitry is embedded on your motherboard, we recommend you try switching off the sound from your BIOS settings and install an inexpensive sound card. True, something might be interfering with the drivers. But, even as reliable as electronics are today, there still might be that one out of several thousand that will malfunction early. It sounds like a bad capacitor in your motherboard's sound circuitry.

Q. There were issues with early versions of GoBack. Has the reliability of this program improved since then?

A. We all know that a program of GoBack's type works at the "master boot record" level. For example, booting from a DOS floppy and using a drive utility such as Partition Magic, and viewing a GoBack enhanced drive with several partitions will show just one single, massive partition. Be sure to put the GoBack drivers on your boot floppy if you need to boot your computer in that manner. Try to avoid using any program that involves the MBR. If you do, you will need to run the "gb_prog.exe" program to re-hook GoBack to the MBR so that the drive becomes bootable again.

We feel confident that the inclusion of GoBack in the Norton System Works package says that GoBack's reliability is "acceptable" but still far from perfect. With that being said, there is still the matter that if something should go wrong, the problems faced by Win2K and WinXP users at removing a corrupted GoBack installation will be rather complex. Ontrack's Easy Recovery Pro has been mentioned as a life-saver in such situations.

This link provides some good info and more links about how GoBack works: http://www.v-com.com/support/faqsgen22.html. Also pay close attention to Symantec support document 2001092611363307 – "When you start your computer, GoBack no longer launches correctly. You may also be unable to access your hard drive."