Our August meeting started at 6:30 with the Windows SIG. There was some discussion as to how to recover Windows or a Windows program when error messages concerning "Missing or Corrupt VxD" pop up. For those who didn’t know, VxD stands for Virtual Device Driver, the small "x" filling in for any number of devices installed in Windows. If a VxD is deleted or, more commonly, overwritten by a new program, any number of odd things, from a refusal of a program to run up to the dreaded "blue screen of death" can occur. In a worst case scenario, Windows will refuse to boot. This brought us into the second area of discussion, how to make a boot disk. The easiest way is to use the "Startup Disk" tab under Start>Settings>Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs.

Our presentation began at 7:05 with Ms. Tara Shiffer (taras@tampabay.rr.com) of 4D Marketing (http://www.4dmarketing.net), who was provided by Digital Chainsaw (http://www.digitalchainsaw.com), a web hosting and site promotion company. She told us how to make a web site more appealing to the different types of search engines in use on the web today and what sort of things turn the search engines off. A brief summary of how a search engine works is that you contact a search engine company (Yahoo, Google, etc.) by their individual processes. If you fail to follow their guidelines, you’re automatically excluded. Once you’re accepted, the search engine will send out a program called a robot or spider to sift through and record information from each page and sub-page for the search engine’s database. How your pages are set up has a lot to do with how many hits you receive. There was far too much information presented to cover here, but 4D Marketing offers a class covering at length all the items touched on during the meeting.

After the presentation we had our drawing. Congratulations to Gary Ennis on winning a copy of PhotoDelux 4.0.