M c Henry County Computer Club

Transcription

1 M c Henry County Computer Club Users Group for PC-Compatible Systems October 2010 Volume 27 No. 10 The October 2010 meeting of the McHenry County Computer Club is October 9, at the Salvation Army Building, 290 W. Crystal Lake Ave., in Crystal Lake. Our membership is $26.00 a year. NOTE: This fee offsets the running of the club; membership benefits include help with computer problems. Please pay Lyle Giese, our treasurer, or the designated Board Member in his absence. Meeting Agenda Introductions & Reports Demo Tru-Crypt and Flash Drives Lyle Giese Break Q & A The Newsletter is published monthly by McHenry County Computer Club, online. Editor-in-Chief: Lucë York ; Webmaster: Cindi Carrigan Direct technical questions to MC3 at: infomc3computerclub.org MC3 website: upcoming demos October Tru-Crypt and Flash Drives Lyle Giese MC 3 OFFICIALS President : Larry Freeman lpfreemanhotmail.com Vice President : Bob Wagner rmwagnerameritech.net Secretary : Shirley Teetsov Treasurer: Lyle Giese Lylelcrcomputer.com Database Manager : Dan Weise Newsletter Editor : Lucë York infomc3computerclub.org (for articles & suggestions ONLY) Past President : John Katkus Webmaster: Cindi Carrigan Board Members : Jack Luff ; Dave Lutes ; Jim Bierle ; Bruce Eckersberg 1

2 Questions & Answers Q: I have a laptop with WiFi. I will be working in a place that has no hotspot or WiFi access. What are my options? I will have 4 laptops on site plus a shared printer. A: There are a couple of options, but it's up to you to investigate cost including contracts involved. 1) My first recommendation is to ask if you can put in your own phone line into the office. In other words, purchase your own AT&T phone line and get DSL on it. If that is a possibility, that would probably be cheapest. 2) Same as 1 except via Comcast cable. You can get dial tone from them also. 3) Use a WiFi hotspot from Sprint or from an Iphone. This would be more expensive, but doable. Again check on contracts and duration! Cricket is another possibility, but it may be harder to share that with 4 laptops. Once you have Internet shared access, the rest is easy and just basic networking. Q: Which is better, Quad Core or I-7 processor? A: Yes. They are both good and probably more CPU power than you can really utilize. Unless you are into high end graphics stuff, like Photoshop, cad drawing, high end gaming. Even with high end games, there is much more to the application than just CPU. You now also have to factor in IRQ latency on the motherboard, quality and speed of memory, quality of chipset, and speed of bus slots. Also the hard drive can make a difference. Q: When will XP updates cease? A: Probably shortly after the next desktop OS is released after Windows7. Microsoft is already not supporting XP, if not at ServicePack 3. Q: WinXP's taskbar is stuck on vertical on right side of screen. Unable to unlock, move or drag ii\t back. This is on a laptop. A: Is the right mouse button broken on the laptop? Plug in a USB mouse and see if that works. Q: I have a digital camera and broke the LCD screen on it. A: I have not had that issue, but just like a laptop, the screen is the single most expensive piece to replace on a camera. If you were considering an extended warranty, they only make sense if they include accidental damage. But then it's probably too expensive to get. Q: I have a new laptop that will not connect with the Linksys wireless. How do I reset/change the security on the router? A: Connect to the router with an ethernet cable. Open a command prompt window and type in the command 'ipconfig' (with out the single quotes). The default gateway is the address of the Linksys router. Open IE or Firefox and use that ip address as the URL (web site address). If you have not changed the login, user id is admin and password is admin. You can then change the wireless security settings and passwords in the router. The address of the Linksys router is usually

3 IPv6 Information We have talked briefly about this at the club meetings. The Internet is currently using IP version 4. It has been doing that basically since day one of the Internet when the Department of Defense was paying for it. IPv4 allows for about 4 billion addresses on the Internet. The world is running out of IPv4 addresses as more and more of the world is being brought online, especially in Asia and Africa. It would appear that IPv4 address exhaustion will occur in 2011 or IP version 6 has been in development for the better part of a decade now. But the near term exhaustion of IPv4 addresses is causing the providers of Internet connectivity to finally take IPv6 serious and implementation is finally taking hold. IPv6 allows for to the 38th power or 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses. That would be 34 followed by 37 zeros! For the foreseeable future, IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist on the Internet and there appears to be no plans to kill off IPv4. There will be ways to bridge IPv4 and IPv6 networks available shortly for our use. Comcast is deploying IPv6 to end-users across the country now. McHenry Com has native IPv6 connectivity now. I am not sure who else has native IPv6 connectivity available. However, if you want to experiment, there are two services providing free IPv6 tunnels for you. and I have used both. Hurricane Electric was more stable for me, but it requires that your public IP address is pingable before it will assign a tunnel to you. Sixxs has better support for end users on dynamic ip addresses. We have already found out that Windows Vista doesn't like native IPv6 connectivity. It's because of how Vista treats IPv6 addressing and for now, you are better off disabling IPv6 in Vista. I don't expect Microsoft to fix IPv6 in Vista. WinXP knows what IPv6 is, but cannot fully utilize it and probably never will. Windows7 appears to be fully IPv6 compatible. From what I have seen, most Linux distributions are and have been fully IPv6 ready for a while. I think MAC OS is also, but have no first hand knowledge either way. What about the club's website? Since I host the website at LCR and we have IPv6, all websites at LCR have IPv6 addresses and are visible via IPv6. We are working on and currently can send out via IPv6 and can accept client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) connections via IPv6. Our mail filtering system has not released IPv6 ready firmware, but I have been told they are working on it and plan on including it in the next major release. I am hopeful for that to hit yet this year. The club website is at or 2607:fcb8:1800:1::14 (this is the website's IPv6 address). The IPv6 address uses a special shorthand notation and is really 2607:fcb8:1800:0001:0000:0000:0000:0014 Right now, this is not information you really need to know, but it's interesting at least to me and I am doing my part to make more and more information visible via native IPv6 addressing. And this is where the internal workings of the Internet are heading by necessity. Lyle Giese 3

4 Freeware by Al Schrader Gadwin Print Screen - This screen capture utility is about the easiest one I have found. With one key (the print screen key) I can capture any or all of the current screen view and save it in 6 different formats. There are options to automatically start the program at windows start, up but I turned that off, delay capture up to 60 seconds, and it allows a preview of what it captured before it gets saved. There are 4 capture types, but I like to draw a rectangle around what I want to capture. I also turned off the mouse cursor so it does not get captured. I created a folder for all my captures. Once I saved the location, it automatically places all saved captures in it. It can automatically create a file name or it will prompt you to create one. One of the new features allows you to create an image shadow (I ve used it many times) or gray scale. They have a professional version, but the free version works good enough for me. I give this a big thumbs up. "Torture" of Seniors by Frank McGurn Torture is a bit strong maybe (Torture - something that causes agony or pain). Maybe frustration would be a better choice of words. A 70-year-old person sits in front of a computer screen wondering what did I do the screen is blank all of a sudden, or how do I answer my . There are lots of questions that can be answered by friends or relatives, if they will take the time. For 5 years I have been teaching a class for seniors who have little or no knowledge of computers. The seniors range in age from 55 to 85. Before the class starts I interview the students: 1 Do you have a computer? (Often a person takes the class to see whether he/she wants to get a computer.) 2 How old is it? What is the operating System? (Most have no idea what they have.) 3 What can you do on your computer? This is how the torture or frustration comes in. My son gave me a nice computer complete with mouse, key board, monitor and printer. He told me I m on line. When he set it up, the computer was running. "How do I turn it off? Where is the switch?" So the senior pulls the plug. "Why did I lose my work?" The senior asks the son, grandchild, or other relative for help and gets the help. But the relative takes over the mouse or key board and quickly, expertly shows the senior what to do: "See? It s easy. That s how it's done." And then, with no explanation, "So long, I have to go now." The seniors tell me the relative is very willing to help, but do not teach, which takes patience and time. A typical problem a senior may have: I want to start a new sentence. How do I move down a line?" The younger person tells the senior just to click the Enter Key. The senior is happy to learn, but younger person didn t complete the lesson by explaining that the cursor had to be at the end of the 4

5 line when the Enter Key is clicked. So if you give a senior a computer, take some time teach so the person won t become frustrated. Did you ever hear of Show & Tell? That's exactly what a younger person should do for the senior who is just learning. Simple functions like highlighting, deleting, back spacing, placing the cursor in front of a word to add another word or correct spelling. Tell what the various shapes of the mouse pointer mean. If the senior is left-handed, change the mouse for a lefty. Most seniors don t know how to eliminate the function popups by using the Escape key or left click. All are done by an experienced computer user automatically. It takes a few minutes to Show and Tell. I find that most of the beginner seniors have no idea that there is help for just about everything you need. It s available by the drop down menu or by clicking F1, and it can be printed. These subjects can help to relieve the seniors frustration. I wonder how many of the computer experts know, or remember, that there is a program called "Help and Support" you get by using "Start". You can get a lot of help free from Microsoft. Just remember older people can and do learn if they are given the help and opportunity. I know because I've helped. 5