Our new president, Mary Sheridan, started the Windows SIG at 6:00 p.m. She began with some new shortcut commands for Windows 95/98. We also discussed how all the new devices like PDAs or cameras have their own special battery and how six months from now no one will carry that battery because an "Improved" device is on store shelves. This brought up a local company called "Batteries Plus". Batteries Plus makes it a point to carry any battery from any device imaginable, and they have been able to custom make batteries not in stock, for a price.

Mary also announced we may be having a swap meet with the Brandon Users Group. No definite date has been set at this time, but there was considerable interest among the members present. Mike Hodges made a plea to anyone with an older system they would like to donate to a needy family. Mike will post a request on our discussion page for anyone interested.

The general meeting started at 6:30 p.m. with Mary introducing the new officers. She also announced a tentative schedule for upcoming presentations.

Steve Singer of RDI (http://morevalu.net/) was our guest speaker. He gave a presentation of current and upcoming computer hardware. Mr. Singer started with motherboards by passing out an Intel and an AMD motherboard for everyone to inspect while he pointed out and described the function of all the slots and ports. He then briefly described the types of memory likely to be encountered in your machine. Mr. Singer even passed out a new AMD Athlon processor for our enjoyment, but he didn’t let it get too far out of sight. Steve also made us aware of a new development with Intel’s new P-III processors: They will do away with the cartridge based Slot 1 and enhance the socket 370 that current Celeron based systems are built around. A bit of bad news for Celeron owners is current 370 boards won’t accept the new P-III "Flip Chips," as they will be called.

With the February release of Windows 2000 upon us, Steve warned that all DOS code has been fully and finally removed from the Windows kernel. For most people this is not a problem, as Windows 2000 will probably be shipped to them on a new system, but if you are going to use hardware or software that has been around awhile you may find yourself out of luck.

Mr. Singer then covered some of the newer peripherals available, such as AGP, USB, Fire Wire, and UDMA 66. AGP is a new video card standard that greatly increases the speed at which images are drawn to your screen. USB and Fire Wire are plug-ins for external devices that will replace the old serial and parallel ports. USB offers the ability to add or remove devices like printers or scanners without shutting down the computer and rebooting. The USB port can address up to 127 devices at a time, with the help of powered hubs. Fire Wire is a faster data transfer technology that has seen a lot of use in the digital camera/camcorder industry. UDMA 66 is the newest connection for IDE hard drives that offers twice the speed of the previous standard. For those of us with older systems or those who don’t want to deal with a complete system upgrade, add-in cards for UDMA 66, Fire Wire, and USB are available.

With the proliferation of high speed, always on Internet connections, network security is becoming more important. A web site called Gibson Research Corporation (http://WWW.GRC.COM) has a service available called Shields Up! It will automatically probe your computer for security holes, then walk you through their suggestions on how to fix the problem.

Mr. Singer then went over networking. Most of us were at least familiar with network cards and hubs, but Steve pointed out the difference between hubs and switches. A hub, which most people tend to use, shares its bandwidth with each connection. The more machines on, the slower the network. Hubs are also half duplex, meaning they only communicate one way at a time. Switches give full bandwidth to each connection and run at a full duplex. u