Western Digital If you have recently purchased a WD hard drive, go to the site http://www.westerndigital.com/fitness/drive-alert.html and read the notice. It seems there is a problem with their drives manufactured between August 27, 1999 and September 24, 1999.

Newsletter I wish to thank all the contributors to this month’s newsletter. It is a big help to me when the membership comes through early with enough material to fill the newsletter and have an extra article left over with which to the start the next month.

Meetings It is not enough that you pay your dues, contribute to and/or read the newsletter and visit our web site regularly, though all that is great, of course. We also need your live bodies at our monthly meetings. It is important to fill the room so as to make our presenters feel they are appreciated. It is also important to the health of the group.

Full System Backup to CD Last month I wrote an article about the HP CD-Writer 8210i, describing how I had made data and music CD’s with it. Now I can report that I have also used the supplied software to make a collection of CD’s for disaster recovery. The process first makes a Windows 98 startup floppy that it customizes for this particularly recovery process. It then copies the contents of all of your hard drives to however many CD’s as it takes to totally backup your system. In my case it used 5 CD’s and took about two hours. I have two hard drives totaling about 7.5 GB ( with perhaps 2 GB free) partitioned into a total of five partitions. To be able to use your disaster recovery CD’s you need to have the drives partitioned exactly as they were originally, so you should write down somewhere what the drive sizes are. I put that information in a text file on the boot floppy. That will allow you to repartition and format your drives exactly as before, boot from the floppy and let the disaster recovery process go on its own from there with you just inserting CD’s when necessary. I hope I never have to use it.

Wonders of the Web This past month I found the web useful for two things: watching hurricane Floyd on TV in West Palm Beach, FL and Washington, NC via the web and ordering a microwave door handle from Sears.

If you go to http://www.broadcast.com, you will find numerous radio and TV stations that you can listen to and watch on your computer. The TV stations, for the most part, only broadcast live during their morning, noon, and evening news hours. But for Hurricane Floyd the West Palm station stayed with it for more than 24 hours, which was of interest at our house since we were putting up a couple refugees from that area. As the storm moved north, two North Carolina stations began their continuous Internet feed. The feed was about 20 KB/sec, so to take full advantage of it you need something faster than a regular dial-up connection.

While visiting my mother a few weeks back, I noticed that her Sears microwave door handle was broken. A year or two ago I had checked if Sears had a parts web site; they didn’t. But now a search of the words "Sears parts" in AltaVista produced the site. http://www3.sears.com/ for Sears Parts Direct. Once at the site, I entered the model number for the microwave and then clicked my way to a schematic of the door, clicked on the handle, got the price, gave my mailing and credit card information, and the part was ordered.

Y2K I finally got around to checking on the Y2K readiness of my two main computers. I did this by going to the Microsoft site and clicking on their Y2K link (http://www.microsoft.com/y2k/). There you can download the Microsoft Year 2000 Product Analyzer, which, when run on your computer, tells you the readiness of the Microsoft programs you are running. I had to do a little updating on both computers. They also had links to major hardware manufacturers’ Y2K pages, where I checked on the readiness of my computers.

Next, from Quicken I accessed their update page while online and was supposedly supplied with all the necessary updates. The Corel site said that Draw 8 and Photo-Paint 8 were compliant, but their WebMaster suite would not be tested. Now, how hard is it to test a two-year old piece of software for compliance? Symantec doesn’t list my WinFax Pro 7.0 as compliant, but it probably wasn’t tested since it is a number of years old. Traveling software says that LapLink Professional is, and so it goes. I assume most programs I have purchased in the past few years are compliant, and the older ones will not be tested by their vendors.

TPCUG Solves Plumbing Problem One of the main benefits of our group is being able to call another member when you have a computer problem or just to share computer information. Wade Herman sent me a link to an article on Cable vs. DSL service. That prompted a phone call from me to him to discuss some other computer matter, and during the conversation I let drop that I had just twisted off a 1/2" pipe inside the wall while trying to install some new pipe along with a new faucet. I had a call in for a plumber since I could see no way to fix this short of making a large hole in my bathroom’s tile wall. "You need to borrow the large bolt extractor that I have for just such problems with my lawn sprinkler system," he said. He brought it over, I hammered it into the broken pipe until tight, then to my surprise the pipe began to screw out as I turned the extractor with a wrench. Another documented TPCUG benefit. Cancel that call for a plumber. u