By Peggy Pulliam, Secretary, Tampa PC Users Group
pegrance@yahoo.com

This month at the Windows Special Interest Group, held just before the special speaker part of the monthly meeting, we discussed the little arrow to the right of the “back” button of Internet Explorer. It shows you where you have been surfing. If you have never clicked on that arrow, try it sometime. Alt F4 closes the current window. That’s a good thing to know, too. Other difficulties with Windows were discussed, and the other members present provided lots of solutions.

Each of us at the meeting received a copy of “Computer Link Magazine”, a magazine customized for the local Tampa Bay area! See http://www.TampaComputing.com for more information on that.

WINDOWS XP is the PRIZE FOR NEXT MEETING!! All you need (if you win) is 200 MHZ, 64 MB Ram, 16 MB Video Ram. Be sure to come to the meeting May 14^th; you can’t win if you don’t show up, that is for sure.

Our speaker for April, Dave Whittle with whats4me.com, introduced us to many interesting types of software and exclusive User Group prices, too. He searches for, finds and presents groups with the coolest and latest software coming out. I’ll tell you some of what he showed us, but without the showing part you miss some great ideas of ways to use your computer.

3D Album - by Micro Research Institute. Incredible visual effects for displaying your photos in a slide show. Sort of like walking through the space age or a museum with your pictures in the place of the famous ones.

PhotoVista 2.0 and Photo Vista Virtual Tour - by iSeeMedia. The first creates panoramas from a series of photos, automatically stitching the scene together correctly. He had some wonderful family travel pictures to demonstrate it. The Virtual Tour creates interactive web sites. Dave said some famous websites use that software, like Porsche and Lexus and Tiger Woods. That’s worth taking a look at for a little demonstration of the product.

He showed us Alpha 5 Version 5 - by Alpha Software. The newest release of the database product that manages information. Ease of use and learning seems to be the big pull for Alpha 5. It was a smooth demonstration of the program’s capabilities. If you weren’t there, you can contact them to find out more because it’s hard to describe, but clubs and churches and other groups could really use this.

One other piece of software, Six Degrees - by Creo. This software is a desktop application for Microsoft Outlook users. After setting it up, it automatically creates and updates a listing of links to the messages you send and receive. So, months later when you are searching for a certain message with a vital piece of information -- it is very easy to locate even if you aren’t a filing genius.

We received a pretty good demonstration of each of these, and we had to opportunity to purchase them for an even further reduced price for being at the meeting. The User Group price is great. You can check it out at http://www.whats4me.com. We had a good time and hope to see you at the next meeting, where someone is going to win a big prize. u