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Sunday, October 3, 2004

Show #80

I’ll be keeping the lines open after 3p today. We’re taping ahead and I need your help! Call in 1–800–520–1KFI from 3–4p today after I get off the air. I’ll be answering calls until around 4:30

 toc | toc 

Today’s news items

People are already lining up at the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test Center to see tomorrow’s historic launch. SpaceshipOne goes up at dawn in an attempt to win the Ansari X-Prize. If you’re on your way (or already there) give me a ring!

Alternate search engines: Clusty and Amazon’s A9. Give them a try and let me know what you think.

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Noon-1p

Stuart Witt, General Manager, East Kern Airport District joined us to talk about the launch tomorrow. Gates open 3am. White Knight goes up at 6:45a. Rocket launch at around 7:45–8a. Watch online at the X-Prize site.

Jimbo from Lakewood writes that Nasa TV also will webcast the launch at Nasa TV X-Prise coverage. You can watch other space related (Shuttle, Space Station, Rocket launches, etc.) programming via links at Nasa TV landing page and on channel 213 on DISH.

Becky in Escondido - wireless mouse isn’t working

replace it with a wired mouse and see if you can get it working. If it doesn’t you have a hardware problem and may need to replace the motherboard. Becky said she installed recharged batteries into the mouse, try new Alkaline batteries first to see if the problem might be the replacement batts.

The mouse may also have lost the connection to the wireless receiver, and she may have to go through the reconnection procedure. This usually involves pressing the button on the receiver, and then pressing the “connect” button on the bottom of the mouse. (The button on the mouse is usually recessed, and has to be pressed with something like the end of a paper clip or the tip of a pen or stylus.)

Joannie in Venice - website for 30th school anniversary

I suggest Yahoo Groups. It’s free, easy to use, and offers all the features you’d want. BlueBoi recommends MSN Groups - he says it has even better features.

Ray in El Monte - wiped hard drive gives him a DMI error on boot

DMI is the desktop management interface - used mostly in business for remote PC maintenance. A DMI error on boot can be a sign that the hardware is having a problem (see this Microsoft tech note). For some good fix suggestions read this article.

Mike in San Diego - looking for a chipset recommendation

Choose your processor first - I like AMD. nVidia’s nforce2 and 3 chipsets are great choices with AMD processors. VIA is also good.

Some good DIY articles. —Kalic

• CPUs (Intel and AMD)
• Chipsets & Motherboards (Intel, nVidia, VIA and SiS)
• AMD Socket-939 DIY Guide
• Intel Pentium 4 LGA775 DIY Guide

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1–2p

May in Los Angeles - what’s a good anti-spyware program to use with Spybot

I like AdAware SE - it’s free. The best commercial program is Pest Patrol.

Joy Lynn in San Diego - monitor can’t be set any higher than 640×480

that’s because Windows has a generic monitor driver installed. Open the Display settings control panel, click Settings, press Advanced, then select your monitor. If you can’t get an exact match, pick the closest match.

She also has a the backdoor Agent 2H trojan on her system, but the anti-virus removal tool can’t find it. Get a second opinion from http://housecall.antivirus.com. You can usually find a standalone removal tool at Symantec’s anti-virus research center or read up on the virus here.

Jeremy in Garden Grove - why is Google so much faster than Windows

Google runs very high powered servers and does advanced indexing on its databases to speed up the search. However there is a way to search your hard drive, and all your documents and email, even faster than Google. It’s called X1 and it’s absolutely addictive. Download the 15-day trial at www.x1.com. It’s now $75 to buy - and well worth it.

Dan says: Leo may not be aware of a similar application on the Mac called Quicksilver - check it out if you are a Mac user - it does some of the same things as X1 does.

Joan in Sacramento - Backing up Outlook

Outlook stores everything in a file called outlook.pst. If you copy it and move it to another computer you’ll need to tell Outlook to use it as its default data file. Click Tools→E-mail Accounts, click Next, then press the New Outlook Data File… button and find your new file.

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2–3p

Mark in Winnetka - AOL Art format stinks

AOL compresses JPEG and GIF images on web sites even further to speed up connections, but the resulting ART files are very low quality. Turn off compressed images in your settings.

bruceb: There’s a format recognized by GraphicConverter called “ART - First Publisher.” Is this the same ART format that AOL uses, or a different format with the same extension? GraphicConverter is Mac-only, but might read AOL art files, if you copy them to a Mac.

—bruceb

He’s also being bugged by a yahoo who used Yahoo Instant Messenger to flood him with chat requests. This vulnerability was well known with earlier versions of the Yahoo client, but apparently it hasn’t been fixed in version 6.

BlueBoi says try Y! Tunnel.

Zkay also adds he may want to try out Trillian.

Kalic came across another Freeware, a multi-IM client - IM2.

Dennis in Pasadena - modem is going crazy

It’s a 3Com WinModem but he’s using it on Windows 2000. Make sure you get the Windows 2000 driver - the driver that came with the modem might work, but it will be unreliable.

BlueBoi 3cmlink.exe errors, if you can’t find the drivers at 3Com: http://list.driverguide.com/list/company2/page2/ (user:driver2, password: all)

Shacklehockey here - In my experience, a brand-new Windows 2000 install doesn’t want to know anything about winmodems. If you haven’t done it yet, install Service Pack 4. I would suggest uninstalling the modem, applying the service pack, then reinstalling the modem.

Dennis in Walnut - web host ripped him off

Earthlink charged him $103 for going 1GB over his monthly bandwidth allotment. Yikes! Make sure to monitor your bandwidth, and ask ahead of time what your web host’s policy is. If there’s a way to cap usage - turn it on!

Arthur in Chino - upgrading his blue and white G4

He’s putting in a new processor, DVD burner, and video card. Total cost $700. The drawback, don’t expect a huge speed increase.

Blue & White was G3, Leo. iMovie does recognize a replacement Pioneer 107 burner as a native burner under OS X 10.3.4 & later. I’ve done the upgrade.

Tim in Claremont - lots of pain video editing

The new Adobe Premiere Elements is out next month and looks to be a GREAT program. It will be around $100.

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