Milt Hull welcomed the audience to the April meeting of the Sacramento PC Users Group and began by announcing that one of our speakers for the evening, Gene Barlow of PowerQuest, would not be able to make his presentation due an untimely automobile accident in Salt Lake City. He was not injured.
The second speaker, Ed Gans of New Horizons, has been given the full evening except for a short discussion by Milt. New Horizons of Sacramento is the local branch of a national company offering classroom instruction, web-based training, and on-line tutorials for a wide variety of computer-related topics. The range of offerings include numerous Windows applications and a large assortment of IT-related certification programs.
April was a skimpy month – Brian Smither was in Colorado, Ken Hopkins in Tennessee, and Tim Cardozo and Tom Anderson had other obligations. Milt briefed the audience on future speakers. The lineup includes ScanSoft showing the latest version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
Q&A
I have been buying blank CDs at whatever speed was on sale. My burner is rated at 42X. I have, in the past, used 16X speed-rated blanks with no errors except for one disk. On this disk, several image files are corrupt. I did not receive any error messages or advisories from the burning software. How likely is it that burning the CD at 42X onto 16X blanks was the cause of this corruption?
The CD blank speed-rating is the manufacturer’s test rating. It’s a good idea to match the burn rate at the blank’s rated speed. With XP and the novice user’s ability to simply drag-n-drop, the possibility exists that the operating system has not been told the lower burn rate.
If you want to adjust Windows XP’s settings for your burner, open My Computer. Right click the burner drive, select Properties, then select the Recording tab. Among the options, you can change the recording speed to use. The default speed is ‘fastest,’ which means the fastest speed supported by your drive, not the rated speed of the blank you just slipped into the drive.
A CD-ROM firmware technology called ‘smartburn’ reads the ATIP of the disc, and if the max speed (or if the CDs fabricator is listed in the firmware) is present, your burner will burn at that speed regardless of how you have set up the burner’s properties page. There are utilities that can read and interpret the ATIP for you - CDRidentifier, for one.
Try that CD in a different CD-ROM drive, preferably in a different system altogether. Try to find an older player. One report tells of a set of 10 CDs burned at "high speed." Of four drives available, a Plextor and an old Mitsumi wouldn't read any of them, a DVD drive would read 7 of them, and only an old "robbed" Mac SCSI in an old P90 running at 1x would read the three others.
How do I disable "Integrated Desktop?" Internet Explorer is still running in the background even if I have closed all browser windows and have disconnected my networking cable.
Information about Microsoft’s "Web Integrated Desktop" can be found at Microsoft’s support knowledgebase article 165695. It cannot be removed from Windows 98 or later. Also known as the "Windows Desktop Update" component of Internet Explorer 4 and is an integrated function of Windows 98 and above, the component enables: the Active Desktop, a customizable Explorer with Web View, a Web-integrated Start menu and taskbar, and the ability to click (rather than double-click) items to open them and to point at items to select them.
Internet Explorer has been split into two components since Windows 98. The browser shell, which is what you see when you think you are running Internet Explorer, and the core components, HTML renderer, certain networking functions, etc. It is these core components that have been integrated within the Windows operating system (and the point of contention in some of the Microsoft vs. DOJ legal wranglings). Many third-party programs have come to rely on these core components.
I run Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. All of a sudden it went to hell in a handbasket. Takes forever to load up, takes forever to download anything, and sometimes it just quits. I have no problems with Netscape. A re-installation didn’t fix the problem.
After installing Microsoft Windows XP update 811493, your computer may slow down considerably. It’s best to uninstall it until Microsoft makes a better fix. Go to the Add/Remove Programs control panel and look for the 811493 update. According to Microsoft, there’s a problem if you have your antivirus’ autoprotect feature switched on during the installation. If you uninstall the update, turn off the antivirus software then reinstall the update. That may fix the problem. Or not. For a more comprehensive discussion, see http://www.updatexp.com/q811493.html.
The autoprotect feature scans files when moving them and/or opening them. Even if one turns off this function, one can still perform routine scanning of the complete system or on-demand scanning on suspect files.
Is there any advantage to using a 10/100 network card vs a 10Mbps only card if all you have it connected to is a DSL/Cable modem?
No. If what you have currently is a 10Mbps card, use it provided that your operating system has drivers for it. But 10/100 cards are finding their way to the junk/surplus bins as well.
I need to capture my video screen into an editable movie. I’m currently recording the S-Video output of my system to tape, then recording and manipulating the "movie." Specifically, I want to send my Powerpoint presentation, complete with animated bullets and whatever, to a video file editor. I’ve used Camtasia before and the animations are ‘jumpy.’ It doesn’t have the power to…. Is there something better?
To directly convert a Powerpoint presentation to a screen saver, try ShowTime at http://www.alienzone.com/.
Microsoft Office 97 comes with MS Camcorder (removed since Office 2000, but if you already have it, it will function). Camcorder will only run in Windows 95/98. Use it to record to a self-executing AVI, playable on any Win32 system. Some users have commented that it may not give the clearest of images. See MS knowledgebase article 159561.
Microsoft has a free Powerpoint 2002 add-in called Microsoft Producer. It’s for Windows 2K/XP. Files are playable in Internet Explorer.
That said, Techsmith recommends: 1) Record at 720x480 to avoid resizing issues. 2) Record at 10fps using the TSCC codec. Most computers nowadays can record 10fps at 720x480. 3) Some DVD burning programs will not accept 10fps, but will accept 30fps. If this is the case, you can use Camtasia Producer to produce a second AVI at 30fps from the original 10fps. If you do this, be sure to use TSCC so that you don't lose quality during the recompression.
A 10fps framerate is pretty choppy. Any animation is going to be jumpy.
Research for a solution provided no results that will automagically take a PPT file and directly convert it to an AVI file without using the screen capture route.
When I get an advisory from Windows Update that a new patch is available, the information given says the download size is 490KBytes. Additional information reveals the actual download will be anywhere from 11-17MBytes. What’s going on?
The initial 490Kbyte download is a "stub." This executable stub scans your system for only those components from the overall 17MByte collection that you actually need. For example, you probably won’t need any of the auxiliary foreign language components. The first 11MBytes everyone needs. Additional components may or may not be necessary depending on what other Windows components or software you have installed. Once the catalog of required components has been created, the stub connects to an FTP site, downloads the various components and installs them.
