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1. Group Meetings OPCUG normally meets on the first Wednesday in the month except in July and August at the National Museum of Science and Technology 1867 St Laurent Blvd Ottawa Meeting times are 7 30 p m to 10 p m Fees Membership 25 per year Mailing Address 3 Thatcher St Nepean Ontario K2G 186 Web address Http opcug ottawa com Bulletin board the PUB II BBS Up to 33 6 kbps V 34 Chairman Bert Schopf bert blackbirdpcd com Treasurer James Fridrich Secretary David Reeves dlreeves iname com Membership Chairman Mark Cayer cayemar statcan ca BBS Sysop Chris Taylor Newsletter Duncan Petrie editor gdpetrie accglobal net Mr Jean Vaumoron layout vaumojav magi com 731 7847 Mr Jocelyn Doire distributor electronic version Jocelyn Doire opcug ottawa com 228 0665 232 8427 jimbo magma ca 723 9658 823 0354 ctaylor nrcan gc ca via PUB II 841 6119 Publicity Chris Seal Facilities Bob Walker Beginners and Windows SIG coordinator cseal istar ca 831 0280 skywalk iname com 489 2084 Duncan Petrie gdpetrie accglobal net 841 6119 Fox SIG coordinator Andrew MacNeill andrew aksel com Fox SIG web page www aksel com foxsig Internet SIG coordinator Bob Gowan gowanb inac gc ca OS 2 SIG coordinator Mr Jocelyn Doire please contact via PUB Jocelyn Doire opcug ottawa com OS 2 web address http os2 ottawa com Paradox SIG coordinator John Ladds laddsj st2. Hint have your Windows 98 disk handy The drivers on the supplied CD were current The user s manual Acrobat PDF file details extensive options to customize the configuration of both the pen and the mouse A beta version of a driver upgrade is on the Wacom website www wacom com I have not tested it but it promises more options While any tablet requires getting used to it re training is painless and quick For conventional text file operations I remain mouse bound Graphics are another story and I have just begun to adapt The pen is more convenient accurate and natural than a mouse when drawing Pressure sensitivity if supported in the host application is the best single feature bonus however this new dimension requires adjustment a light touch By choosing a USB port model I can continue to use my programmed multi button mouse as long as the Graphire s pen and mouse do not rest on the tablet For older non USB equipped systems you could replace your current serial port mouse with this combination and gain many features On the downside I would like a larger active area this of course is offset by the demand for more desktop real estate More skilled artists might fancy a larger tablet more precision presently 1015 lines per inch with a positional accuracy of 0 02 inches and a larger variety of tools dedicated pens airbrush but my requirements are too modest to warrant the additional expense That aside
3. http hotfiles zdnet com cgi bin texis swlib ho tfiles info html fcode 0011GB This enormous database provides the location of hardware drivers for everything Hopefully you can locate the driver and determine its author and version history While this is an indirect approach it beats nothing 44 gt Ottawa PC User s Group January 2000
4. the freedom from the vagaries of a conventional ball mouse since the base of the Graphire mouse is sealed there is no ball to gather dirt is worth the cost For a few dollars more than Microsoft s light mouse you get not only the mouse but also the graphics tablet pen combination Although this is little more than an open the box assessment I am impressed with this combination particularly for the price Stay tuned lt p Partition Magic Continued from page 6 prices I have seen PM 5 as low as 67 locally Is it worth it I highly recommend Partition Magic If you don t already have a copy version 5 0 is a very impressive package Be sure to read my review of version 4 0 for more information on the many other features If you already have version 4 0 take a look at the new features above to see if you need any of them If you don t I would recommend sticking with version 4 0 If you have a release prior to version 4 0 there are enough new features and capabilities that I am sure you will find the upgrade to version 5 0 worthwhile lt gt lt January 2000 Ottawa PC User s Group OTTAWA PC NEWS Ottawa PC News is the newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users Group OPCUG and is published monthly except in July and August The opinions expressed in this newsletter may not necessarily represent the views of the club or its members Deadline for submissions is four Saturdays before the general meeting
5. Word or any other Office 2000 application loaded and see the effect immediately after making a change This can be very handy to get immediate feedback on a change If you don t know how to safeguard your Registry you might want to get help from someone who does First take a look at how to change an existing location Note that throughout this article I will refer to the File Open dialog box It also applies to the File Save As dialog Continued on page 3 Coming up Care and feeding of your computer 2 Meetingealendar m eer ne en 2 Club news Club life Reuse recycle er a eee 3 Software Hardware reviews Parntion Magie a a 6 Wacom Grapkinerkablei T E E T T Dunc Petrie s corner ETAS NES E E A E 4 UE ONM ALS ee A E E 3 DELEON ANVEN VENSTONS mit ieee 8 Next meeting WEDNESDAY January 5 2000 Coming Up Care and feeding of your computer Tips from the Bloom service desk Join us for the first OPCUG meeting of the new millenium as Harley Bloom and his crew from Bloom Microtech share helpful hints on maintaining and upgrading your computers Staff from their service team will be on hand to offer tips for computer do it yourselfers and field questions from the audience Digital camera quality This photo was shot at the December OPCUG meeting with a Sony digital camera The resolution was good enough to print the photo out at 8 x 10 in colour Shown here is presenter John Stephens Gene
6. won t go into more detail on the basics of Partition Magic Anyone interested can read my review of version 4 at http 206 47 37 30 public reviews partmag2 htm even if you don t have access to the Internet you can access this web page by using Wildcat Navigator and a dial up line to PUB II Ask me if you need more info New features The new features in version 5 while not terribly extensive are very impressive You can now merge two FAT or FAT32 partitions The contents of one partition becomes a subdirectory on the other While this could be manually accomplished with previous versions it is much faster and easier with version 5 PowerQuest has beefed up conversions between partition types With previous versions you could convert from FAT to NTFS PM just called the NT utility Convert to do the actual conversion There was no way to convert from NTFS back to FAT Now you can convert from NTFS to FAT or FAT32 You can also convert from a primary partition to an extended partition or vice versa This can be a real timesaver over manual methods Although PowerQuest has claimed they have improved their wizards I did not look into this at all I always find that rolling up my sleeves and doing it without wizard help suits me better But those who like a simple click and you re done type operation may appreciate this You now have the ability to view the list of pending operations This is very welcome With version 4 0 it was pos
7. x and pagefile sys for Win NT the Registry could contain references to the file no data but the filename might prove significant and HTML browsers may hold references or copies in the cache or temporary files subdirectories i Continued on page 5 4 Ottawa PC User s Group January 2000 If you intend to use one of the utilities listed make certain that it performs to your expectations These utilities often offer a long list of options many are not enabled simply by mere installation on your system Of course they deal neither with the Registry entries nor any of the duplicates that may or may not exist elsewhere When dealing with the Windows Registry and some browser entries it is important to remember that their deletions are performed like file deletions they are marked as deleted without being overwritten Here I suggest that two choices exist You could manually edit the entry drill down in the Registry structure using Regedit to the offending entry and replace the string value with one that is equal or longer in length Now if you delete it conventionally the residue is not compromis ing Your success or otherwise depends on the correct text string as the search criterion The Registry is a complex file that is intimidating for the uninitiated backup first proceed with caution and be prepared for the eventuality that you have overlooked something Never forget that Windows maintains its o
8. EVAL99 to get the special pricing Other PowerQuest products are available on the same page all at discounted prices Note that a shipping charge of US 10 00 per total order may push the price close to local store Continued on page 7 6 Ottawa PC User s Group January 2000 CORNER WINDOWS DUNC PETRIE S BEGINNERS Wacom Graphire tablet vn rei The October issue of this newsletter announced the imminent arrival of Wacom s Graphire an integrated tablet pen mouse combination This nifty little gizmo has many positive features cost at 135 locally it is half the price of its big brother Intuos USB connection a ball free cordless 3 button scroll wheel mouse a batteryless cordless pressure sensitive eraser equipped pen a bundled version of Metacreations Painter Classic lite but still competent version of Painter PenTools a plugin set of graphics enhancements and PenOffice an integrated drawing note taking and document annotation package The tablet is compact about eight inches square with a 5 x 4 inch active area and has a convenient pen holder A single connector cable attaches to the USB port no separate power supply is required There is no pass thru USB port Setup was simple and flawless connect the hot pluggable tablet and Windows Note Windows 98 is mandatory ran the Install New Hardware wizard Software installation was quick I experienced no problems
9. Smee ee a OTTAWA ZAAPC NEWS Vol 17 number 1 The newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users Group January 2000 Software Customization Enhancing Office 2000 iy cis tio As the saying goes it s all about location location location The Office 2000 File Open and Save As dialog boxes have a great deal of added functionality over previous versions One of the handiest things is a bar on the left side with icons for common locations History My Documents Desktop Favorites and Web Folders Of course Microsoft did not think of how to make life easier to find the folders you need to access just those they thought you need to access If you don t normally need one or more of the existing locations you can modify them to suit your needs Or if you don t mind changing to smaller icons you can double the number of locations to 10 giving you five user defined locations Warning this involves editing the Registry Making mistakes in the Registry can seriously harm the bootability of your computer There is The NMS amp T s Fifth Annual Great Computer Swap takes place on January 15 from 10 00 4 00 and OPCUG will be there The Museum asks all people selling computer goods to ensure their stuff is Y2K compliant Individuals non commercial can reserve a half table for free by calling 991 3053 no undo button when you edit the Registry As a matter of fact as you make the changes listed below you can have
10. al headache occurs from Windows virtual memory If you use the default option Control Panel System Performance tab Virtual Memory button and Let Windows manage my Virtual Memory settings Recommended in certain situations you will face a formidable challenge The swap file both Windows 9 x and NT 4 is scaled dynamically in response to the amount of memory the operating system and various applications require Suppose that you were multitasking and as a result a very large amount of your hard drive space was allocated to virtual memory Now close some applications and their associated data files The swap file size will shrink The freed space no longer required by the smaller swap file is now marked as unused How does the operating system treat unused space that previously held data Right you re caught What do you do Here one of the secure delete programs that has the ability to wipe the unallocated portions of the disk is essential Alternately cumbersome you could exit to DOS delete the existing swap file attributes must be reset and write garbage files until the entire free space is overwritten If your hard drive partition s capacity is measured in gigabytes I wish you well Paranoia While I don t subscribe to needlessly inciting panic perhaps a measured dose of scepticism is healthy Today s applications are complex Many features witness Redmond s recently disclosed file tracking tracin
11. atcan ca Graphics SIG coordinator Mr Jean Vaumoron vaumojav magi com Directors without portfolio Terance Mahoney terancep cyberus ca 225 2630 Mr Jocelyn Doire Jocelyn Doire opcug ottawa com 851 4496 951 4581 731 7847 System info DLL and Driver Versions by Dunc Petrie The December Beginners and Windows SIG had a lively discussion about DLL s and drivers Typically your system worked correctly until you installed new hardware or software Now the new addition is functional but something else has quit The likely culprit s a DLL or a driver These files typically undergo revisions the result is a new file version a full number upgrade a dot upgrade or a different build If the inoperative device or application required a more recent software version than the version that you just installed installed then Guess what There is amechanism to trap perverse upgrades Usually a dialog box pops up to request your OK to replace a filename of filesize and file creation date with another but nothing performs flawlessly Windows version tracking scheme leaves something to be desired More practically what work arounds exist Which version of a file is installed on a system Is it the most recent available What company wrote it and what software or hardware does it support Many of these files will yield their secrets to a right click Properties query Most of the Properties dialog b
12. e a Windows Explorer box helpfully offers a Delete button on the Toolbar The problem Most users are aware that the operating system s file removal paradigm is superficial only the filename is removed actually the first letter is changed to a symbol that the operating system recognizes as the identifier for a deleted file and the clusters are freed in the file allocation table FAT Eventually the freed space will be overwritten by new files but in the interval data can be recovered This blessing in disguise was the basis over the years for the many unerase utilities Peter Norton of Norton Utilities fame started the trend with Unerase other variations included Central Point Software s PC Tools Undelete and Mace Utilities Undelete Shareware offerings were also plentiful For those who work in high security environments or who want to remove sensitive information without fear of nasty surprises things are slightly more complicated Of course you could always f disk and then reformat the disk In the days of small hard drives or floppies this could have been an alternate Today the high capacity of most hard drives would negate this solution unless you can afford several hours to restore the information that you need to retain assuming your backup is valid Government agencies have and may still physically destroy storage devices to prevent any snooping Numerous companies look at the advertisements under Data Recovery
13. g capability to any computer that had a network interface card are poorly documented or even disclosed What are the true capabilities of software Recently there was a suggestion urban myth that the United States has the technical capability to reconstruct data from media that had been cut into pieces Physical reconstruction was not essential the data on each segment would be copied and proprietary software would perform the logical reconstruction Conclusion Unfortunately progress invites complexity One tends to leapfrog the other if you are not state of the art I recommend that you consider upgrading or encrypting sensitive documents or both Perhaps you should simply remember everything Postscript An important caveat never blindly trust these utilities Despite the efficacy of these procedures given the resourcefulness of the proprietary data recovery companies I doubt that all vestiges of wiped data are eliminated Critical or confidential data may well require heroics that are beyond the scope of this article o gt January 2000 Ottawa PC User s Group 5 Software review Partition Magic by Chris Taylor Ah fall is that time of year The leaves have fallen there is a snap in the air and PowerQuest has released a new version of Partition Magic PM The Ottawa PC News has reviewed previous releases of PM and every year PowerQuest manages to add enough new features to make the reviews worthwhile This
14. in PC Magazine and The Computer Paper offer sophisticated albeit expensive proprietary data recovery schemes Improper wiping has caused embarrassments to both corporations and governments Then Historically utilities were available that could totally remove any trace of a deleted file Norton originally introduced WipeDisk and WipeFle these evolved into WipeInfo WipeInfo offered options not only to delete all traces of a file but also to wipe the entire logical partition the unused part of the partition or the slack at the end of a file the difference in space allocated by the number of clusters assigned to the file and the number of bytes that the file s data actually occupied National defence chiefly US organizations had a variety of formal protocols users defined the number of overwrites and the overwrite character s in accordance with the sensitivity of information Similar utilities were available from PC Tools Wipe and Mace Utilities Destroy although I don t recall if Wipe and Destroy met the US government standards None were upgraded to provide compatibility with Windows 95 and beyond long filenames or FAT382 and Now Commercial software offerings are slim Symantec has reintroduced an updated WipelInfo in its current offering of Norton Utilities Norton Systemworks 2000 There are a number of shareware applications including not an exhaustive list Eraser several offerings use this title including a
15. ne Choose the option to adda new DWORD value Name the value show and leave its data as the default of 00000000 This will cause the Web Folders in the Office 2000 File Open dialog box to disappear Now there is room to add a custom location In Regedit under the Places key you will see a key labeled UserDefinedPlaces Click to select it in the left hand pane Then right click in the right hand pane Choose the option to adda new Key Name the key Placel With the new key Place1 selected in the left hand pane right click in the right hand pane Choose the option to add a new String Value Name the value Name Double click the new Name value and change its data to the name you want to appear in the File Open dialog box An example might be Budget or Newsletter About 20 characters can be used before ending up with in the display Right click again in the right hand pane and choose the option to add a new String Value Name the value Path Double click the Path value and change the data to the location you want An example might be c data budget or d docs work newsletters You can also use a universal naming convention to specify a network location by using server share for the value data where server is the name of the remote machine and share is the share name you want to point to At this point your new custom location should be visible in the File Open dialog box If you want to keep all of the existing locations or w
16. o be opened automatically in its host application assuming that you have the requisite application installed on your system There are also utilities Key View Pro or Quick View Plus are widely used examples that permit you to view proprietary files with most formatting intact of a large selection of applications you need not have the application installed on your system Two sites that I have discovered I am certain that there are others offer extensive listings of file type by extension and identify the parent application www whatis com ff htm claims that it lists Every file format in the world www kresch com exts ext htmalso has an exhaustive listing Bookmark these sites for reference if you need to identify an unfamiliar file 44 magazines books or any other computer Gy paraphernalia you want to GIVE AWAY to the general meetings and leave them in the area specified If you don t bring something you may want to TAKE AWAY something of interest so look in on this area Any item left over at the end of the meeting will be sent to the recycle bin ooo January 2000 Ottawa PC User s Group System Info Erasing Fi les by Dunc Petrie During one of the Windows and Beginners SIG sessions a participant posed a question about deleting files that contain sensitive material Superficially erasing a file is a simple procedure DOS used the format del path filename extension and of cours
17. ould like to have more than five locations you can make a registry change to switch to smaller icons and have up to ten locations To change to smaller icons navigate to the Places registry key located above With Places selected in the left hand pane right click in the right hand pane and choose the option to add anew DWORD Value Name the value ItemSize and leave the data at the default of 00000000 You can now add up to five new keys under UserDefinedPlaces named Placel through Placed and add name and location string values to each as described above To undo any of the above simple delete the values or keys you created To revert to larger icons delete the ItemSize value under Places To un hide one of the default locations delete the Show value under its key You can remove the custom locations simply by deleting the appropriate Place n key In Regedit deletions are performed by right clicking on a key or value and choosing the Delete option Interesting Website alert Club life File Formats by Dunc Petrie Reuse recycle The proliferation of file formats continues to increase exponentially it seems as new applications or new versions of existing applications appear Naturally these file formats are proprietary for casual Web surfers I suspect that many are also Bring your old computer obscure Windows file associations link a file type identified by its extension to an application and allow that file t
18. oxes will include a General tab that provides for example the location file size creation date modification date and most recently accessed information A Version tab if present will also supply the version build information description what the file is or does and the name of the company that created it You can obtain some of this information by examining the file within NotePad WordPad You ll have to wade through a lot of non intuitive symbols unless you can invoke some educated guesses for the Find function Typically not always the information appears near the beginning or the end of the file If you have the Resource Kit may not be included with OEM versions of Windows 9x you can use the FileInfo utility Unfortunately this utility is a partial blessing it addresses only those files included with the particular version of Windows that you installed Windows does include an extensive selection of third party drivers however it is impossible that every eventuality will be addressed If you have installed hardware or software that load proprietary files in addition to Windows system files then you ll have a lot of information to assemble To provide information about files mostly DLL s I believe that were not part of Windows original installation you can try http support microsoft com servicedesks fileve rsion This online database should answer a lot of your questions Another source primarily for drivers is
19. ral Manager of The Focus Centre Please note that the February OPCUG General Meeting will be held on Monday February 7 rather than the first Wednesday of the month Meetings Date Time and venue January 5 7 30 p m National Museum of Science OPCUG General Meeting ahi oe oe of Your Computer and Technology 1867 St Laurent Blvd TBA note this is a Monday Ottawa Paradox Users Group Third Thursday of each month 6 15 pm Inly Systems 1221a Cyrville Rd 7 15 pm Sir Jean Talon Building FOX Pro Developers SIG To be announced Conference room Tunney s Pasture Holland Ave north of Scott St PIG SIG January 5 after all the other SIG s Good Times cafe at Shoppers City West or is it WING SIG All questions be they serious or not Baseline and Woodroffe 2 Ottawa PC User s Group January 2000 Customizing Office 2000 Continued from page 1 Click on Start Run and type in Regedit then hit the Enter key In the left hand pane click on the plus symbols to navigate down to HKEY CURRENT USER Software Microsoft Office 9 0 Open Find Places StandardPlaces Below here you will see five keys Desktop Favorites MyDocuments Publishing and Recent that represent the five icons in the Open dialog box I will use Web Folders represented by the Publishing key as an example Click on Publishing in the left hand pane to select it and right click in the right hand pa
20. sible to queue up a series of actions For example you could delete a partition move another re size a third to fill in the empty space and convert a fourth Although you could then see the expected end result you could not see the list of all the operations that would take place Sometimes that meant I would cancel all pending operations and re do them just to make sure I understood what was going to happen Now I can call up a simple text listing showing all the pending operations If I am happy I then click on the Apply Changes button to have them carried out The user interface has been cleaned up quite a bit Things are more logically laid out and easier to understand New visual indicators are used to show where the first two GB of the disk ends and where the 1024 cylinder lies Both of these can be important to know since some operating systems have certain restrictions with respect to one or the other of these boundaries PowerQuest has included a treasure on the CD ROM There are some documents in Adobe Acrobat format that contain a lot of detail about hard disks and partitions They are a terrific source of information for anyone interested in knowing nitty gritty details about disks PowerQuest should highlight the existence of these documents Partition Magic v 5 is being offered to OPCUG members for the discount price of US 30 at their web site You can order it at www ugr com order Enter the user group code UG
21. t least one freeware version Shredder95 Clean Disk Security and East Tec Eraser Visit www winfiles com to download trial versions All work with Windows 9 x a few are Windows NT compatible I have experimented with a few and they seem to work well However I am not suggesting on the basis of my limited tests that these applications are suitable for your security needs For those who have the ability to use a hex editor for example Norton s Disk Editor you can wipe data and then investigate the results at the bit level Needless to say for a file of any length this would be a daunting procedure Tip of the iceberg When DOS and to some extent Windows 3 x reigned it was relatively simple to completely eliminate all traces of a file by using one of the dedicated high security file deletion utilities that I described Windows 9 x and NT are more complicated Numerous sites exist within Windows that might contain duplicate files alternately the presence of only a descriptive shortcut thank you long filenames might prove embarrassing Some examples I don t suggest that this list is exhaustive particularly for Windows NT include C Windows Recent Start Documents C WinNT Profiles Admini 1 Recent Windows NT only Recently opened files listings within applications word processors for example Timed backups within applications the virtual memory swap file win386 swp for Win 9
22. wn series of backup files of the Registry Finally don t forget to erase also the embarrassing evidence in your own backup The other alternate is to edit the Registry file manually by using a hex or sector editor like Norton s Disk Editor Diskedit exe A long filename compliant 32 bit aware version is shipped with Windows 9 x versions of Norton Utilities or SystemWorks note that it is purely a DOS application Earlier DOS based versions of Norton Utilities included a separate manual called Disk Explorer that provided an intimate discussion of all facets of theory and practical application of a hex editor The Windows variants provide little documentation printed or online for the inexperienced Mark Minasi s The Complete PC Upgrade and Maintenance Guide mine is the 4 edition offers a reasonable discussion There were several excellent texts either out of print or consigned to the residual bin that discussed hard drive architecture hex editors and data recovery While data recovery in this context is the opposite of the desired outcome the processes to locate the data strings are similar Trash Yes one person s garbage is another s treasure Do not forget the Recycle Bin or its enhanced counterpart in Norton Utilities or SystemWorks Beware unlike the Windows Recycle Bin Norton s Unerase Wizard strives to recover everything including files deleted at the DOS prompt Painkiller headaches The greatest potenti
23. year is no different Partition Magic v5 0 adds some gee whiz features that leave everybody scratching their heads saying Geezzz how in the heck do they do that What it is First a recap Partition Magic is a powerful utility for creating and modifying hard disk partitions It can handle most partition types used in PCs FAT16 FAT16x FAT32 FAT32x NTFS HPFS HPFS 386 Linux Ext2 Linux Swap and Extended partitions It is deft at resizing partitions changing cluster sizes hiding unhiding partitions and converting between various partition types without losing any data What I have found most useful about Partition Magic is its ability to resize partitions I frequently partition drives into 3 sections On my NT machines I create a small drive C as FAT and install an emergency configuration of NT I then create a large partition format it as NTFS and install my main version of NT there Finally I create a small partition for stuff I want to have available but just out of the way What if Inevitably at some point I find one of the partitions too small Maybe a service pack comes along and I need to add it to both versions of NT Perhaps I did not leave enough space on the C volume Or I want to add a utility program to my third partition but it is too small Well I never have to worry about this sort of problem any more With Partition Magic I can quickly and easily resize my partitions to suit my current situation I
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