The meeting begins with 43 paid members. We welcomed two new visitors, Otto Kosch and Ray LaPlume (correct me if I have the spelling wrong).

Steve Darabaner tells the club, “Happy Army Day, it’s March 4.” Get it? (March forth). He also wants everyone to know his e-mail for the Gmail invitation (ams3507@gmail.com). Also related to last month’s discussion about Gmail is the fact that the service restricts attachments with the .exe and .pif extensions. To overcome this, John Sturgis recommends zipping attachments with Winzip.

We have been having many problems with e-mail not getting through. Katherine Croxton reminded us to notify the club if your address has changed.

Yvon Trapanier gave us the financial report at the beginning of the meeting. The 2004 Financial Statement was approved through acclimation. Microsoft Excel was used to prepare the spreadsheets. There were no errors and everything balanced. Bob Young #1 explained that Excel is easier than Quicken or Lotus. Formatting cells and printing formats were touched on. Bob Young #2 says that Quattro Pro does the same thing with Word Perfect, and John Sturgis suggested Open Office as a free alternative.

The club was shown the ads in the ELCC classifieds.

Norton Utilities Problems

If you have Norton Utilities you may have problems installing programs. Also, some Microsoft software doesn’t have the install program on Disk 1 but on one of the other disks. John Sturgis suggests installing new programs in Safe Mode. Just press F8 as you are booting up. Bob Young #2 believes that Norton Utilities is bad and that it’s best to delete it.

Easy Cleaner v 2.0 is a good thing to have to get rid of Norton as well as to get rid of other unnecessary registry entries that may be slowing down your system. To download it go to http://www.toniarts.com/products.phpI found that this site asks for personal information. Go to www.majorgeeks.com/download414.html for more privacy.

Firewalls

If you have Sympatico, you are prevented from using other firewalls such as Zone Alarm according to Katherine Croxton. One good thing about Windows XP is that it comes with a firewall called Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). To configure this go to http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro for directions.

Right after the break we have our bi-monthly film clips in the USB Cruzer. John Barker showed us five very funny slapstick tv commercials. The feature a forgetful senior leaving behind a walker, a fur coat that turns into mink rodents, and dirt bike, swing set  and satellite tv commercials.

11:17 p.m. Q&A session. Katherine Croxton talks about VOIP. John Sturgis has a .pdf tutorial on the subject on the ELCC (Yahoo) website.

People Search

You can search for people using their phone numbers. Go to findaperson.canada411.ca/search.

Computer Answering Machine

You can use your computer as an answering machine using software available at http://www.voicecallcentral.com/ This is really fun stuff. Just imagine your phone saying things like “please hold the line, your call is very important to us” with the Chipmunks playing in the background.

On a more serious note, installing software from Kazaa may cause a crash. Fortunately, as Bob Young #2 tells us, there is XP System Restore to the rescue. See www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport. You can automatically create a restore point for every day the computer runs. Since this uses up space, John Sturgis suggests limiting this to two weeks. You can do the same thing on a more limited scale with Windows 98 by going to Run and typing in “scanreg.” Bob also told us about unloading unnecessary things that may be bogging down your system by editing the notification area (a.k.a. the system tray for us Win 98 users). To do this go to Start>Run> and type in “msconfig.”