December 2003
Contents
1. amp PS2 For many of you there will be polygon this holiday com ing through your game plat form In many cases games are getting better but some think they can get away with doing more marketing and tying to films or TV shows to overcome bad game design So check the reviews and your friends to know where to best put your cash If you are really in a quandary you can al ways rent them first at your local video store Play with respect and destroy the alien before it eats you Timothy Everingham is CEO of Timothy Everingham Consulting in Azusa California He is also Vice Chair of the Los Angeles Chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH the largest chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery s ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques and one of Southern California s significant professional organizations within the entertainment and media industries Further information can be found at http home earthlink net teveringham The Association of Personal Com puter User Groups APCUG an international organization of which this group is a member brings this article to you WEB WANDERINGS By Gil Smith Copied from CCCC Central Com puter Club Santa Maria CA ASK OXFORD Are you passionate about lan guage Well so are the publish ers of Ask Oxford You can get a lot out of this site Like what you ask Well there is a Word of the Day section Games Quotations and an Ask the Ex pert2. by Windows In my experi ence the added informa tion is of little value As long as I have had my Sigecom Internet cable connection 3 years I have been paying a monthly rental fee of 8 00 for the cable modem I recently learned that you can now buy a cable modem from Sigecom and have it in stalled for a total fee of 65 clearly a much better deal Shortly after I ordered the new modem the old Nortell box went on the blink so its replacement with a sleek new WebStar unit came just in time KKK MINUTES of NOVEMBER 16t MEETING Due to a sudden severe illness Jim Derk was unable to pro vide the program for the No vember meeting Hopefully he will be able to meet with us at some time early in 2004 A room filled with members and two guests entertained and educated themselves with lamentations and discussions about current problems with personal computers Jim Geiser opened the program with an offer to present a do nated printer to whosoever may need one Larry Trapp offered to take it home The roll was taken with an invitation for each person to tell What bugs you about computers Jim Geiser and Harold Sunn both described problems with their PC shutting down for no apparent reason while in op eration Terry McCrary experiences all sorts of weird things including shut down He just restarts and continues work He also de scribed a free program that defrags RAM in 40 of the time Keith Hem
3. console wars Nintendo seems to be losing Twice this year Nintendo had to do a special promotion bundling when the GameCubes sales went significantly lower than Microsoft s Xbox Over the last two years Nintendo has had many companies that exclusi vely developed for their platform start developing games for other platforms as well This year two well known game publishers decided to discontinue publishing games for the GameCube In addition Sony Playstation 2 games are reported to be about 70 of the console games sold Sony and Microsoft built their consoles with the concept of it not being just a console but a home entertainment device They also had plans for online gaming Nintendo did not on both counts which has hurt them The next generation of consoles are expected to arrive 2005 2006 and the results may be a live or die situation for Nintendo as a console manufacturer For those who have recently bought or upgraded PCs with good graphic cards and CPUs and want to show them off with some great games Vivendi Universal Games Half Life 2 Electronic Arts The Lord of the Rings Return of the King and JoWood s AquiNox 2 Revelation are games you should consider The Lord of the Rings Return of The King will be on the consoles too Some good WWII action titles are Electronic Arts Medal of Honor Rising Sun for the consoles PC version later on and for the PC Activison s Call To Duty Electronic Arts has
4. more concerns Pim has a new lap top with a 1400 x 1050 screen When playing Pinball he must lower the screen resolutio n Harold Sunn s new version of Scrabble is even worse and won t run at all Keith He mingway observed that many older games would not play on newer machines He suggests getting X Box or Play Station for games Bettie Cook stated that Evans ville On Line s e mail program had Filtered Messages held in EOL s mail program online that takes the alloted user stor age space Jim DeRudder reported that when he is looking at a web site for The New York Times an ad comes up in the middle of the article Pim suggested that he try a free program called Ad Subtract which acts as a proxy Jim Marsh told of a GPS pro gram for PDAs available at Radio Shack Terry McCrarey has a GPS for his laptop that talks It tells the user how to navigate to a given destination The proposed slate of officers for 2004 is President Jim Ges ier Vice President Don Cure ton Secretary John Powell and Treasurer Ruth Hadley Alternate candidates can be submitted until the election at the next meeting on December 14 Respectfully submitted John Powell Secretary Aided and abetted by Kay Anne Peake Configuration of My NewPC By Larry Trapp Webmaster Homepage Evansville Ostomy Chap ter e mail Itrapp insightbb com Well I broke down and built up the courage to update my Dell T 600 with a new PC I chose a
5. DECEMBER 2003 The P See UrGent THE NEW THE BEST and THE WORST December 2003 Collected by Pim Borman SW Indiana PC Users Group Inc Too Much Safety Yes you can have too much of a good thing even safety I have my new notebook computer equipped with all the safety features I consider necessary To start with there is Norton Antivirus Then there is the ZoneAlarm Pro firewall which compk ments the hardware firewall in my Netgear wireless router I use AdAware Pro to protect against spyware that may steal my privacy with the potential for identity theft and that may take over my system in order to push its in your face ads I have installed the Google Toolbar for easy Web searches but Google also takes it upon itself to filter out pop up ads by default To eliminate most advertising from Web pages I use AdSubtract PRO that also wants to check for cook ies but at least not by de fault My browser is Internet Explorer 6 which incorpo http swipcug apcug org rates its own protection le v els against scripts DirectX and cookies Outlook Ex press 6 by default removes attachments that in its opin ion may be harmful to your system s health including some harmless programs your friends might send you turn that off by going to Tools Options Secu rity and uncheck the option to Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened I also have Outlook Express set up to show messages in te
6. M HOLE read Computer Don s advice on Helping to Control Spam with Outlook Express Message Rules how the known hoax about the JDBGMGR EXE file is now being used to spread a worm Audacity a free new audio editor and RoboForm 4 3 7 a free program that deftly automates one of the more annoying tasks surfers face filling out Web based forms The HUMOR section has contributions from SWIPCUG member John Powell and several more from my old friend in Venezuela Kees Vuurman who is suffering under the political unrest there We have new PHOTOS of the November meeting with the help of Terry McCrarey You can read about the NEXT MEETING before you receive the next newsletter Visit the NEWSLETTERS section to read previous electronic editions of the P See Urgent The online editions do not contain graphics to reduce file size for faster downloading AREA LINKS has links to member Web sites as well as other local sites of interest Please send questions comments and especially material to Pim Borman your Web site editor at swipcug sigecom net Please note that this is a new email address since the previous one is being overrun with spam DECEMBER 12 MEETING Election of Officers xxx Program WebFeat My Millennium eebooks Three new products at the Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library Speaker Mike Abaray Associate Director of Support Services of Evansville Public Library System 5 amp Locust Street 2ed Floor Audi
7. Quiet Light Pentium 4 Intel 865PE 800FSB Fire wire 1394 S ATA RAID 100Mbit Ethernet by Poly well You can locate a facsim ile of my new PC online at http www polywell com us d esktop poly865rf asp I wanted a 2 8 GHz Pentium 4 1GB DDR SDRAM two 120GB RAID 1 hard drives Dual Formatted DVD LCD Monitor with at least 6 USB and 2 Fire Wire ports I also wanted at least 3 open PCI slots My reason for ordering this config uration of a PC was security I need all the security I can get for the 270 page website I created from scratch 5 years ago I have an ostomy and I have been a member of the local United Ostomy Asso ciation Chapter for 12 years You can find our chapter s web site at http www ostomy evansville net I discovered several highly ranked PCs via PC Magazine over the last 3 4 years I read about each PC maker sepa rately then when it got down to making my decision I chose between the Dell 8300 and the Polywell 865RF I started off by pricing the Dell 8300 I talked to three different tech nicians and only one of these three technicians seemed knowledgeable enough to suit me He listened to me rather closely and then he e mailed me a configuration of the PC I suggested with the price list of each component and total cost I got on the phone and talked to the technician salesman for the second time I forwarded him the offer I got from Dell He noticed several things that were not configured eff
8. Word versions you probably know that you can access the spel checker with F7 and the the saurus with Shift F7 But by right clicking on a word you get a dropdown menu that includes not only formatting choices but also immediate access to synonyms inclu d ing the thesaurus It also pro vides a link to translations of the word in various foreign languages provided you have installed the dictionar ies for those languages Checking back I find that Word 2000 has the same fea tures except for the transla tion option Dell continues to be one of the leading providers of high quality state of the art computers at reasonable cost but nobody is perfect I just heard that Dell is go ing to do away with the in famous foreign tech support operations with technicians that are hard to understand only for commercial cus tomers however My personal peeve with Dell is that they load their systems with all kinds of unwanted software In my new notebook computer I was at least offered the choice between Norton and McAfee anti virus software the latter is the default but I also found software to subscribe to AOL Earthlink MS Hot mail as well as time limited trial versions of programs such as Paint Shop 7 and Dell Picture Studio Dell Image Ex pert By the time I had removed most of the un wanted junk my hard drive needed to be defrag mented Dell also insists on adding help informa tion to that provided
9. again brought out another of its excellent James Bond series James Bond Everything or Nothing consoles only for now Ubisoft s Prince of Persia The Sands of Time PS2 and Tom Clancy s Ghost Recon Island Thunder Xbox are definitely worth your consideration For you fans of Electronic Arts Battlefield 1942 PC there are the Secret Weapons of WWII and Road to Rome expansion packs The release date for Microsoft s Halo 2 Xbox is March 2004 but the first version of this excellent first person shooter has now been released for the PC Ubisoft s Beyond Good amp Evil PC amp consoles gives a unique mixing of game genres to provide an excellent action adventure If you like survival horror games try Kononomis Silent Hill 3 for the PS2 For those who like more thoughtful games look at Microsoft s Rise of Nations reat time strategy game PC Electronic Arts has an expans ion pack for its RTS Command and Conquer Generals Command amp Conquer Generals Zero Hour If you are a fan of the Sims there is the Making Magic expansion pack where spells can produce love or turn someone into a frog Microsoft s Flight Simulator 2004 A Century of Flight PC is another title you should look at For aerial combat look at Microsoft s Crimson Skies High Road to Revenge Xbox and Lucas Arts Secret Weapons Over Normandy PC PS2 amp Xbox For you Star Wars fans there is Lucas Arts Star Wars The Clone Wars Xbox F
10. iciently and components that were falsely represented Then the salesman technician from Polywell e mailed me a counter offer I got back in touch with the Dell Salesman and he tried to slough off the mix up on the single formatted DVD burner he tried to sell me He also tried to slough off the XP Home Edi tion Operating System he took for granted that I wanted Anyway by this time I had enough I got back with the Salesman technician with Polywell and questioned a Hard Drive Configuration he tried to sell me and he admitted he had made a mistake and sold me a better Hard Drive that was con figured more efficiently for the same price I also asked him about the price of the 21 inch LCD monitor he tried to sell me and I found out the night before that I could buy that particular monitor at Best Buy for 300 00 less He said man you done yourself a favor be cause you physically went to the store to see the 21 inch LCD monitor you wanted He said that no one should buy a moni tor of that caliber sight unseen At least he was honest to admit this to me Finally I asked the Polywell Technician Salesman if he would partition the hard drive for me and he said that is not a problem He sent me the final offer with a break down on price and I verified it and faxed him my MC number and the deal was consummated By the way the Polywell Technician Salesman also agreed to taking the two 120 GB Hard Drives from different ba
11. ingway told of shut down problems and update problems with WIN 98 and a Norton product Don Cureton told of startup problems and he experiences frequent pings with Zone Alarm Duane Morrow experiences slow down when SIGECOM circuit is busy Pim suggested that he reboot the MODEM by unplugging it for a few seconds Pim Borman s problems in volved his safety conscious ness with a router firewall Norton AntiV irus Ad aware Zone Alarm etc Now he can t access sites that need cookies He had to turn off Zone Alarm to do updates Gordon Kelley and Ruth Had ley both described problems with a window saying that a program had committed an illegal operation Dennis Scherrer described dial up network connections that don t work Clara Kress upgraded Norton and now gets illegal operation notice when playing Free Cell Maury Keller told of error messages appearing but they go away Mike Abaray said the library must run a variety of programs on a lot of computers Susan Reynolds got an I O Magic external CD burner that wouldn t work with her older machine It was suggested that she defrag and try a slower write speed Cynthia and Kenny Mossberg use agricultural software and miss getting manuals to guide the operations Jim DeRudder says funny things were happening until he replaced the power supply in his computer Now it works fine The meeting concluded with a For the Good of the Order session that revealed
12. or the sports fans for football game you should look for Madden NFL 2004 from Electronic Arts PC amp all consoles which fits the general rule that Electronic Arts either has the best sports game or tied for first As with all of Electronic Arts sports titles only the Playstation 2 version is playable online Microsoft s Midtown Madness 3 Xbox is a racng through traffic game For a fighting game there is Namco s Soul Caliber IT all consoles If you like shooting things up with your racing try Midway s Spy Hunter 2 all consoles Then there are games for those who don t want to follow the tules Sony s Downhill Domination PS2 is an off road outlaw bicycle racing game Then as a follow up to their successful Outlaw Golf Simon amp Schuster Interactive has come up with Outlaw Volleyball Xbox Of course for those who really want to go outlaw Rockstar Games Grand Theft Auto Vice City is now available for the PC If you are looking for a massively multiplayer online game Sony Online Enter tainment s Planetside PC is a breakthrough on game play and realtime graphics SOE has also come out with an All Access subscription where you can play all their MMOG for 21 95 a month A joint venture with Lucas Arts Star Wars Galaxies An Empire Divided PC got off to a slow start but many of the bugs have been fixed and it is becoming quite popular Square Enix s Fi nal Fantasy Online XI also looks good PC
13. problem Since AdSubtract acts as a proxy between the com puter and the Internet Mi crosoft instructed me to add the names of four update programs to the AdSubtract Control Panel Even that did not solve the problem I finally disabled ZoneAlarm and was then able to download the update patches Subsequently I found that I had no longer access to my email sites at Yahoo and Ly cos They both complained that I had some cookies turned off they insisted I accept I turned the cookie control off in ZoneAlarm but that didn t do it Only after turning off the popup controls in ZoneAlarm and Google could I access my Yahoo and Lycos email again It also solved the problem of downloading later Windows updates Because of all these shenani gans I have disabled many features of the various pro grams designed to protect me Interestingly ZoneAlarm Pro asked me to upload the settings I am using with their program so they can better understand what the users need They may find that many users disable large parts of the additional fea tures added recently The answer may be to aban don all these individual protec tors and switch to an inte grated safety suite such as the new Norton Internet Secu rity 2004 that combines anti virus protection a firewall with a Web assistant that blocks ads and gives access to other program options in MS internet Explorer as well as a Network Detector that allows different firewall op
14. r While many look forward to chest nuts roasting on an open fire too many of us are dreaming of polygons Yes it is the time for the largest release of games for computers and video consoles of the entire year This year we have gotten to the point of cinematic quality in games Games like Vivendi Universals Half Life 2 and Electronic Arts The Lord of the Rings The Return of the King are up to the standards of what one would expect in an animated movie Some games artificial intelligence units which control the adversary units are improving so that after a while the adversary will pick up on the players tactics and make adjustments which then requires the players to change their tactics However some games continue to remain dumb so your enemies don t even know you are there unless you hit them over the head with something Games based on movies or TV shows continue to be generally bad but there are some except ions like Electronic Arts James Bond series of games One trend concerning such games is that some of those games are directed toward the general population rather than toward the hard core gamer This has lead to some games having bad reviews by the hard core gaming press and hard core gamers But because non hard core gamers enjoy these games they wind up as a best seller Examples of these are Atari s Enter The Matrix and Electronic Arts Harry Potter and The Sorcerer s Stone In the game
15. s section For those of you who like odd trivia you ll enjoy the section that gives you the history of a word and where it originated There is even a Question and Answer section for those of you who have deep probing language questions http www askoxford com WHAT IS Have you ever been curious what those IT people are tak ing about Well here is a site that has thousands of defini tions for the latest IT related words Just pop it in their search engine and get your definition or better yet browse by letter or topic Believe me if you can think of the word they probably have the defini tion you are looking for Here s an example Lazy load ing is also known as dynamic function loading is a mode that allows a developer to specify what components of a program should not be loaded into storage by default when a program is started Ordinarily the system loader automatically loads the program its dependent components at the same time In lazy loading dependents are only loaded as they are specifically requested Lazy loading can be used to improve the performance of a program if most of the dependent components are never actually used Isn t that more helpful than being told that it s dy namic function is loading http Wwhatis techtarget com SWIPCUG Southwestern Indiana Personal Computer User Group Inc P O Box 4336 Evansville IN 47724 0336 ON OUR WEB SITE http swipcug apcug org In the WOR
16. tches Some body made this suggestion to me but I forget off hand who it was Well I am listing the various component of my new PC be low Configuration MBP4 865VL13PE 1 Poly865RF 800FSB P4 8XAGP 1394 LAN SATA RAID 5 1 CPIP4E2 8 1 Intel Pentium AC Processor 2 8GHz 800FSB 512K HT MEDD40 512 2 DDR 400MHz 512MB PC3200 Memory Unbuffered CSTX10 A962W 1 Plati num 10Bay Aluminum Mid Tower w 400W PS 1394 HDSA120ST1 2 Seagate SATA 120G 7200RPM HD 8M Cache FD14T 1 Teac 1 44MB 3 5 Floppy Drive DCE ONBOARD 1 On board RAID 0 or 1 ATA Controller KB104M NATUK49 1 Mi crosoft MultiMedia Key board PS 2 OEM MOMPS INTE EXPL 1 MS Intelligent Explorer Opti Mouse OEM CDDVD TOS 1802 1 To shiba 16X DVD ROM EIDE Drive CDDVDRS DRUSIOA 1 Sony DVD RW R DVD RW R 4 7G CDRW DRU510A MSSB ONBOARD 1 On board Standard PCI Audio Sound GAAN GFT5600 1 Nvidia GeForceFX 5600 128M 8X AGP DVI VGA TVout MD56IFM V92 F40 1 Lu cent OEM 56K V 92 PCI Fax Modem Voice NAEE ONBOARD 1 On Board 10 100Mbit Ethernet OSWXP PRO 1 Windows XP Professional CD License SA24TS OSS1LY 1 lyr IAI Third Party On Site Service SAEXTWARRS 3 1 5yr Labor 3yr Ltd part warranty SAMBS MODUL AXP 1 User Manual Assembly Packaging M ay Y our H olidays Be Filled W ith Polygons By Timothy Everingham TUGNET teveringham acm org Again it is getting cooler Fall is here and the holiday season is just around the corne
17. tions for different networks privacy control that prevents confiden tial information to be sent out in email instant messages attachments and Web forms AntiSpam in pop3 compliant email integrated with Micro soft Outlook Outlook Express and Eudora and parental con trol options with different privileges for individual users List price is 69 95 but if you already own any Norton or Symantec software you can get the upgrade version for 39 95 It is likely that you can find an even better deal in local electronics or stationery stores Also Norton has learned over the years how to make their programs easy to use and understand I may give them a try before long as soon as my current anti virus sub scription expires The bad news is that the 2004 version now includes a product activa tion procedure to ensure au thentic ity That means you can use it only on a single computer and you need to buy extra copies if you want to protect other computers Bits and Pieces If you own more than one computer but mostly use only one of them to access the Internet you can still protect the other systems with a free and highly recommended anti virus program called AVG It is easy to use and provides weekly updates that automatically install It can be downloaded from http www grisoft com us us _index php I happened to notice a handy feature in my new MS Word 2002 version If you are at all familiar with previous
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19. xt format only not HTML that can be contaminated with worms and viruses Windows XP PRO has its own firewall program but that is turned off by default To turn the firewall on or off go to Start Settings Con trol Panel Network Con nections Click on the kind of connection you have e g broadband or wireless click on the advanced tab and take it from there All these safety programs started out with their own narrow well defined areas of protection Now the features they offer are overlapping and may cause the system to slow down What s worse they may start to interfere with the system s operation After receiving my new notebook my first action Newsletter of Southwestern IN Personal Computer Users Group PO Box 4336 Evansville IN 47724 0336 was to perform an online Windows XP update multiple gigabytes of downloads Then I activated Norton Antivirus already installed on the computer All this time the hardware firewall in my router was the only protection against intruding miscreants until I installed ZoneAlarm PRO Finally I installed AdAware Pro AdSubtract and the Google toolbar Several days later a Dell program alerted me to the availability of additional critical Windows Updates I went to the MS Update site and proceeded to download the new patches The download halted as soon as it started for some obscure reason but the Update web site at least offered help in determining the
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