By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

In the previous newsletter I suggested that members step forward and volunteer to do presentations since it is getting difficult to land presenters except possibly in cases where they have a product to sell. And these products are never major pieces of software, since the days of presentations by companies like Microsoft and Adobe are in the past. Well, we didn’t find a presenter for July and none of you came forward, so on returning from a trip to New York City, I thought about what I could present. While there, I traveled to a data center in New Jersey with people who were installing a new server. I took photos and spoke with the owner of the center about the data center industry in general. I thought that I might be able to get a presentation for our group out of this information. What you saw at our meeting in July was the result.

Apparently all is not well in the data center world where there is far more capacity than need. The owner of the data center I visited said that only five percent of data center capacity nationwide was being used. It appeared to me that no more than 40% of his cabinets had anything in them. But that is a lot better than 5%. Do you recall several years back when they were worrying if California was going to have enough electricity to supply all the data centers that were being built. I think I even remember an article in the local paper speculating on the availability of power for data centers being planned for Tampa. They mentioned a new one to be put in an older building downtown. Possibly that new data center was never placed in downtown Tampa.

Networking In the past month two members contacted me with problems getting networking set up on their laptops. One was on an older laptop running Windows 98, the other on a new laptop running Windows XP Home.

First the new laptop. The owner used the XP networking wizard to set up his network consisting of the XP laptop, a Windows Me desktop and a Linksus cable/DSL four port wireless router. He had Internet connectivity but could get nothing to work as regards networking, and the laptop’s manufacturer, Gateway, said it wasn’t their problem since the network card was working fine in the computer and they couldn’t be responsible for the rest of the computers in his house. Looking at my network setup while talking with him on the phone, I first discovered that he really could see the new laptop from his desktop computer--he just hadn’t known how to do it. He was trying to use a Remote Desktop Connection instead of simply using Windows Explorer or going to Start | Run and putting “\\ComputerName” in the text box and pressing Enter, where ComputerName would be the appropriate computer you want to view.

Getting the new XP laptop to view the desktop took a bit more work. To make the story short, I basically had him undo all the settings that the networking wizard had set and replace them with the ones that work on my systems. As I recall, the problem was a setting or two in WINS configuration of the advanced TCP/IP network settings. One was disenabling LMHOSTS Lookup. After that, everything was OK.

For the fellow with the older laptop, he wanted to connect to two desktops running XP and a new Linksys router, I went through my usual checking of network and network card settings to no avail. The laptop could not ping the router. He had already contacted Lynksys support to no avail. I suggested that he bring his laptop to my house to see if I could get it to connect to my network, or if with one of my network cards it would connect.

He brought it over, I connected it to my router--and he was on Internet and connected to my network.

So what was his problem. It was either his router or the network cable at his house. Since he had tried the connection with different network cables which worked fine for his other computers, that wasn’t the problem. And the router worked since the other computers were communicating with it. What was different about the laptop?

Returning home, he again contacted Linksys, but this time spoke with the router people instead of the network card people. They had him do the usual of assigning an IP address to the laptop, which you shouldn’t need but had been tried before, but added another wrinkle. They had him slow down the connection. In the properties of the network card on the advanced tab there is a drop-down box where you can select your LAN speed. The default is Auto Sense. Linksys had him change it to 10Mbps--the slowest connection. I think that is what did the trick, not the fixed IP address.

Networking seems to be a problem. I thought I had pretty much mastered it, but missing the slowing down of the connection for one of the computers shows me that I don’t know everything. Of course, one doesn’t really want to have to slow down the networking to make it work. Since it worked at full speed connected to my network, something is deficient about his setup at home--possibly his router.

New Laptops These new laptops are certainly nice. The other member with a networking problem has a new Gateway M500s, which seems like a real good buy at $1,499. It has a very large screen with resolution higher than 1024 x 768, a 40 GB hard drive, 512 MB RAM, 2.2GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor, etc. Its only drawback from my point of view is that you really can’t change the configuration--you buy it the way it is and, I suppose, allow Gateway to sell it a bit cheaper as a result.

It sounded like an ideal computer for my daughter in college, except that the operating system is XP Home which can’t be upgraded in the purchase, and I wanted her to have XP Professional. Why, you ask? Well, I want to snoop on her. Not really, but I would like the ability to access her computer remotely (at her request and with her permission, of course) using Remote Desktop Connection and take control of her computer so as to try and fix any problem she may be having.

For this to work, the computer being accessed needs to be running XP Professional, not XP Home. The computer I am using to do the accessing can be running anything from Windows 98 on up as long as the Remote Connection software is installed on it.

After doing my research and visiting the local Gateway store with my wife and daughter, we settled on the Gateway 450X laptop. It has all the features of the M500 except the screen size (one inch narrower) and some sound capabilities (the M500 has a subwoofer and special sound controls on the deck of the computer). Additionally it can be configured as you like and comes standard with the Intel Centrino Mobile processor, a plus. XP Professional is also standard. Too bad they didn’t have a two for one sale because I would like to have a new Gateway laptop for myself. u