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

We had our usual Questions and Answers about Windows at the Windows SIG. We heard about methods to file taxes quickly and easily available with Turbo Tax. And Mike Hodges (TPCUG treasurer) has offered assistance if you want help with IBM repair.

Our featured presenter was Mr. Dave Whittle who represents several software companies and has taken it upon himself to show us some of the new and fun things available in the way of software. He has been acquainted with user groups since 1979 and has a way with presenting things to a group to keep everyone interested.

He was demonstrating on an IBM ThinkPad T-40 with 1.6 MHz Intel Centrino processor, a cool-running processor with wireless connectivity. It runs very fast because Intel has redesigned the cache and other things to increase the speed and prolong battery life easily to 5-7 hours. No Joke! And it really does run cooler. You won’t need a thermal pad to actually use it on your lap. He also mentioned that you can get a presentation seminar kit from Intel for the group at http://www.intel.com/personal/pcug/.

For $20 a month any “hot spot” can be used to contact the web using your prescribed wireless service. As an example, there are hot spots at major bookstores in cities around the nation. He travels a lot and has found it completely trustworthy.

On his laptop he showed us 3D Album -- Lots of different ways to present pictures and add music to your presentation, making sharing pictures a lot more fun. Just open the program, point to your photos, choose a presentation style from over 70 choices and click “build”!

Next we saw Muvee Auto Producer 3 which has some new technologies. You add still pictures and music to match the mood of the pictures, and the program analyzes and automatically adds them, edits out the junk, puts it together and makes a really nice movie presentation. Use your super 8 movies on CDs; if you have really bad footage that just won’t go together, you can use a “still” style so the poor footage is still good for viewing if you use Muvee Auto Produce 3.

Photo Vista Panorama 3.0 -- Lets you take pictures and stitch them together to make a 3D panorama picture of your snapshots stitched together.

Portable Document Format Active PDF Symphony is a much less expensive replacement for Adobe’s full-version Acrobat. There are two different parts to this, a Composer to create the PDF document and the Maestro that lets you edit it.

Check these out on the web for more information, but if you want to buy them be sure to go through the club because Dave offers us a discount.

It was another good evening of presentations of software nearly everyone can use. We had a door prize, too: MS Money, which Jeanne Gillespie won. u