Minutes of the May Meeting
By Peggy Pulliam, Secreary, Tampa PC Users Group
Pegrance@yahoo.com
Before the TPCUG meeting this May we had our usual Windows SIG where we learned that if there is trouble booting up your computer, lost drivers, etc., boot in Safe Mode, then reboot. It reloads the original drivers, and you should be able to get going again. You can also use MSConfig.exe to see what is running on your computer and help troubleshoot.
Tampa PC User Group member Bob Lafave has a CD of Shareware he has compiled available. If you are interested contact him at boblala@ij.net.
The meeting this month was about the Intel Pentium 4 Processor with Hyper
-Threading technology! Kevan Sheridan presented the overview. Circuitry is added, and a single processor is recognized by the operating system and multi-threaded application as TWO logical processors – increasing productivity like crazy.Kevan started us out with a hilarious clip from the movie Men in Black II (the post office scene) to help us get the idea of what it would be like. It’s like having another set of arms to do your work. When you have this capability you won’t see the pauses that happen when you are running a program. For example, with a game you may have seen this. An object on screen halts for just a moment and then continues. This doesn’t happen with Hyper
-Threading technology. It works at the hardware level.Hyper
-Threading Technology requires a computer system with an Intel Pentium 4 processor supporting Hyper-Threading Technology and an HT Technology enabled chipset, BIOS and operating system (your XP Home will work for the OS). Performance will vary depending on the specific hardware and software you use. See http://www.intel.com/info/hyperthreading/ for more information, including details on which processors support HT Technology.We as a club have an opportunity to be granted one of these processors by Intel, and we are planning to apply for it. If that works out, we will have a demonstration in the REAL with all the fixings!
The meeting ended with questions and comments about the technology and our door prize, Publisher 2002, of which Merrill Friend was the lucky winner.
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