Minutes of the October Meeting

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

The beginning of the meeting was spent discussing Microsoft and other areas of interest. We are looking for volunteers for the Tech show in Tampa, in December of this year. This is a good way to keep our name in view and find new members at the same time while getting all the goodies and meeting the local tech types. Contact Mary Sheridan for dates and information if you can help with that.

Click here for details and free registration.

Our presentation this month was a Norton Ghost demonstration by Bob LaFave. Just in time for Halloween.

Before that he presented a delightful PowerPoint presentation featuring the talking Microsoft Agents.

Norton Ghost 2003 protects your data from computer disasters. The intuitive Windows interface makes it easy to create regular backups of your hard drive. You don't even need to make a boot disk. File restoration is simple from the comprehensive disk image.

We saw:

You'll need the diskette you make to restore your computer if you lose everything, which has been known to happen. You’ll want to prepare for that; if you are prepared for an emergency it doesn’t happen.

This program allows you to extract a singular record and place it somewhere. You can start and complete part of it and complete the rest later. Other programs only start and go all the way through; if you are stopped midway, you have to start all over.

It makes building multiple machines with the same image very quick; one image can be used for all the machines. Everything in the registry is moved over. One unanswered question remained about the registration of the software.

At the end, Bob showed us some other cool items too: We saw the Google tool bar. It has pop-up stoppers. Check that out.

Be able to open four pages at one time with the Avant browers. Set the browser up, as you want it. It opens pages faster than Internet Explorer.

We had a bunch of door prizes won by the following people.

  1. T-Shirt - Merrill Friend, John Waldon, Bob Davis, Brian Lance
  2. Spell Checker - Peggy Pulliam, Carlos Nogueira
  3. Microsoft Works - John Waldon
  4. Smart Computing magazine subscription - rian Lance. u