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

Announcement: FACUG (Florida Association of Computer User Groups) is having their User Group Expo -- Spring Conference in Kissimmee. Contact Mary Sheridan if you are interested in going and interested in expanding our group’s activities. Who knows what all else they will provide besides fun and samples!

There was some discussion about ZoneAlarm, a system firewall. Apparently when it was deleted it didn’t completely uninstall all its parts and remained to cause trouble blocking Internet access completely. If you are having a problem you can check at the “system configuration manager” on your computer and see what is running at startup. Then you can find it and get it deleted.

As part of the benefit of membership in TPCUG you receive the newsletter, can get a great T-Shirt with our logo on it for only $6.00 and attend two Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings each month.

We have Visual Basic SIG on the 3^rd Tuesday each month at 6:30 at Gateway. We have Access SIG the 1stt Tuesday at 6:30 at Gateway. See the SIG report in this newsletter as to whom to contact to make sure the meeting is on and there is room before you plan on going! These meetings are very flexible and can cover your needs in these areas, just bring your questions. More people are always welcome at these meetings.

Our Feature Presentation was from Merle Nicholson on the “Pocket PC”. An incredible little instrument. He showed exactly how to use it and demonstrated many of its features. It uses a lithium ion battery for indiscriminate charging, (You don’t have to wait ‘til it is really low before charging it for fear of developing a shorter charge span.) This little pocket pc records to wav files, has a docking station connector and smart media storage. You can even get a cell phone attachment or a GPS attachment. It has a very large storage capacity and has versions of Word and Excel it can use, and you can do an incredible amount of actual computing with it and even store pictures without using up all work storage. That was a great presentation for a powerful little tool.

We didn’t have a door prize this month, but we did confirm that the winner of the Windows XP from last month has not yet installed it on his computer!

We took a break in our really nice meeting room and had some more discussion about, you guessed it, computers and their programs and ended the meeting. u