Here are a few loose items from my month of computing in June. There were far fewer problems this month than last.

First off, in the last newsletter I noted that I had installed Win 98 on my main desktop after having some problems that necessitated the reinstallation of the operating system. That gave me an excuse to move up to 98 on that machine. This month, since I was running a bit low on space on my C drive, having to religiously delete unneeded files in order to maintain 200 – 300 MB of free space, I decided it was time to convert that drive from FAT 16 to FAT 32, moving from 32 KB clusters (the smallest allowable block of data) to 4 KB clusters. The idea is to recover a lot of wasted space. And it worked. Under FAT 16, I had 232 MB of free space; after the conversion I had 888 MB—quite an improvement.

But the conversion was not without problems. Windows 98 has a FAT 32 conversion program in its System Tools that does the job. As usual with such things you are supposed to stop all running programs before starting. I forgot about the virus scanner, and a few minutes into the process I received the message "There is not enough memory to convert the drive. Edit your ConfigSys and your Autoexec.bat file……". I was being asked to remove any programs that were started in these two files. McAfee virus scan was the only one, and I put a REM in front of the pertinent line to stop it from loading.

Starting the conversion process again, I got the same message. Of course, there was nothing now in those two files to start, but just in case the process got into the Windows’ part of the boot, I removed everything that was in the Windows’ startup folder and everything set to run in, I think, the Win.ini file. That should have taken care of everything. But it didn’t.

The same message appeared, but this time I had paid attention to what was scrolling on the DOS screen as the computer booted. And I saw two file names go by. One was C:\Tools_95\guest.exe and the other was C:\logitech\mouse\mouse.exe, the first dealing with my Zip drive and the second dealing with my Logitech marble. I could find nowhere that they were loading from, but I knew how to stop them from loading—I simply renamed both of them temporarily. After that the FAT 32 conversion was happy and did its thing, taking about an hour to convert a 2.1 GB C drive. When finished, I changed the two file names back to the correct ones.

The second thing of note last month was a Visa charge of $59.95 to DMR* info@4hlp.com that I didn’t recognize. There was also an 800 telephone number after the name so I called it and was informed of the company name, which I can’t remember. I do recall that they said that they were a clearing house for Internet charges made to various online companies. I said I believed they had a charge for me that I hadn’t made. No problem, they said, just give us your account number and we will see to whom the charge was made. I did and was informed that on a certain date I had made a charge of $59.95 to SexHeaven.Com. Not I, I said. Oh, she said, it looks here as if the company has already issued a credit (probably exactly when she got my phone call), but you should contact your Visa company just to make sure. I, of course, contacted Visa, and they eventually sent me a print out showing that DMR* info@4hlp.com had issued a credit.

The question is, how did I get charged in the first place. Worst case scenario—my card number, etc. had been stolen from an Internet transaction. That didn’t seem likely, since just one incorrect charge had been made. On the other hand, the speed of their "credit issued" announcement implies these "errors" are frequent. Nonetheless, my guess is that a transaction for someone else was simply keyed in wrong and their credit card information was just a digit or two different from mine. So check out those credit card bills. If you enter everything in Quicken or Microsoft Money, you will know what is yours and what isn’t.

My most recent purchase brought home how much we in the computer world have benefited from falling prices—should I say plummeting prices. My laptop came with 32 MB of RAM, and I thought that should be enough, but during the previous Internet SIG I had a half dozen applications running—FrontPage, Corel Draw, PhotoPaint, Family TreeMaker, Microsoft Word, and Internet Explorer and then started a conversion of a Word document that was close to .5 MB to an HTML document. Something went wrong and the computer hung. I don’t know if memory was the culprit, but a couple of days later I purchased an additional 32 MB. The price was $99. Less than two years ago, the 32 MB I purchased for my previous IBM ThinkPad cost around $350.

Memory, hard drives, monitors; the prices of everything in computing (except Internet stocks) is dropping like a rock. A year or so back, entire systems that would do what most users needed dropped below $1,000, then to $600 more recently—and now to nothing. That’s correct—nothing. Well, almost nothing; you have to purchase three years of Internet service for $20 per month. This final offer reminds me of the old Polaroid camera pricing. They sold you the camera very cheaply, then you had to buy the special film at their usual high price. Except, here I am not sure what the equivalent of the film is. Is it the Internet service? Today $20 per month is sort of the going rate for the usual ISP. But what about two years down the road? If the rate drops to $10 or nothing (if you are willing to look at an ad on each page), then signing up for three years to get that computer may not seem like such a good deal. Especially if you could then get twice the computer for $200.

Why can’t auto parts follow the same price decline curve as computer parts? Every time I spend a small fortune on the simplest auto repair, I think of all the nice computer doodads that I could get for the price of the repair parts. Sometimes it would be an entire system. Perhaps the government should investigate auto parts pricing instead of Microsoft.

Office 2000 is out, but I am not jumping at it. The problem is that I use every one of the programs in the most costly version, Office 2000 Premium: Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Publisher and FrontPage. All are working fine now, so I will wait and collect opinions and comments from the Usenet newsgroups concerning the various components before jumping on the 2000 bandwagon. I am particularly interested in the changes to Access and FrontPage.u