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

Our meeting started a little late at 7 PM. We talked about our Special Interest Group meetings, which are being held at the Kate Jackson Community Center in Hyde Park. This is a great new location for the Access and Visual Basic Groups. The meetings are tailored for the group that arrives, so don’t be worried that you won’t fit in; just show up with your questions and have some fun learning new things.

The main part of the meeting was started, and Merle Nicholson presented Windows XP. It is very crash proof – so Merle says and some others in the room agreed. The door prize at this meeting was a copy of Windows XP, which we had been working up to for a few meetings.

The start menu comes up with the last five or six programs used. Your favorites and the ones you use all the time will be there for you to click on without having to go to the Start area and choosing from the longer list.

The My Pictures area allows you to do a slide show with your photos. Any folder of photos can be viewed as photos and as a slide show. This is a feature that used to require special program software but is now standard. You can organize your photos very easily.

Power Toys were shown; you get those from the Windows Download area. There are interesting, helpful utilities for Windows available there.

XP carries an account manager with it for security. Two users can share or NOT share by setting that up according to their needs.

Customize your desktop in the Display area – you have options of backgrounds, and on User Accounts XP lets you set what you want a user to be allowed to do. So if you have a guest who will be using your computer you can set that up and limit access. You can get sophisticated with all the bells and whistles, but you don’t have to and can work up to fancier settings after you learn a few more things.

XP comes with some CD burning capabilities built in, so you don’t need to get CD software for basic needs in burning CDs, and it walks you through each thing very smoothly.

Merle suggests that partitioning your hard drive, to keep your earlier programs running, is not necessary – most everything is easily updated. BUT there are other programs that won’t work with XP so you’ll want to make the decision separately, but there are XP updates to cover most needs. XP won’t run DOS though, so if you have any of those to run you definitely want to partition and keep your earlier Windows version available for running DOS.

Expect to spend a few hours getting your new XP set up if you are updating programs because you will be going on the web to find the updates and downloading and get them onto your computer, but once that’s done you’re all set and, like he said, it’s pretty crash proof, so it will be worth the effort.

It looks as though we can count on a fairly easy set up and a good stable operating system once we walk through the steps. Windows XP is trying to make it easy for everyone; with the increasing numbers of people using computers, that’s an important feature; while not losing the advanced features either, seems they have done a good job!

I couldn’t believe my ears when they called one of my ticket numbers for the prize! So I went home with a new copy of Windows XP.

We hope to see you at the SIGs and at the next meeting on June 11^{th, we have a good time and there’s always some kind of refreshments and usually some prizes to win. u}