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General Meeting Minutes
18 February, 2006
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E-Mail Developments
Gmail is a great new alternative to conventional e-mail. As Gmail isn’t stored on your computer, there is no worry about spyware or spam. Attachments of up to 10MB are allowed, and you are allowed to store 1G worth of messages. Although it is in beta, it is a completely stable system, and is much more secure than Outlook Express or Thunderbird. With attachments this big, you can send your friends your latest musical performances plus all those programs you have written with Visual Basic! John Sturgis suggests that you use Winzip to send your attachments so that your anti-virus filters will be sure to pick up any virii sent by mistake. Remember the Corel disc accidentally shipped a few years back with vireo? Everyone can make a mistake. Another suggestion from John Barker: If you get an attachment with the .email extension, change it to .eml if you can’t open it. With changing internet standards these days, many still have programs that won’t recognize the new .email extension. Google has more to offer these days than just the new e-mail program. Bob Young #2 showed us how the search engine’s new Local Search works. If you type in an Elliot Lake postal code, you will get a list of local businesses. Searching for exact text strings by using quotation marks around search parameters such as “Bob Young #1” will direct you to the Elliot Lake Computer Club. Windows XP and Spyware has a great new anti-spyware program. Well, it isn’t exactly new it was bought from Giant Anti-Spyware. Go to www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/. Don’t worry about the beta designation; it’s only new as far as Microsoft is concerned. However, worry if your version of XP was pirated because this program may delete your operating system. That version of XP you bought can look very real. You will soon need Genuine Windows on your computer or you cannot get updates for it beginning this summer according to John Sturgis. This verification that Microsoft will do through the internet will really affect the bottom line of small computer shops in the big cities, especially the ones that seem to offer the best deals ;-).Other XP Issues A great alternative to the Real Player is Media Player Classic that comes with Real Alternative. This Media Player plays everything.If you have scanner problems, go to Driversguide. This will help Mary Carey to get her scanner running. If you have an HP scanner, it’s better to go to HP’s site rather than to Microsoft. Uninstalling Norton Anti-Virus is another issue. Sometimes you just need to do it to save money or because you want to use another product, but it isn’t easy. Go to Norton’s own site for advice. The url is service1.symantec.com/.If you wish to test the speed of your modem go to homepage.eircom.net/. A large interest was expressed in digital photography. The December 14, 2004 meeting of the Digital Camera Group SIG discussed. John Sturgis mentioned the HP website for cameras and www.howstuffworks.com for digital photography.
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