By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

This is going to be another short newsletter. The articles are just not there. Possibly the newsletter needs to change--to what I don’t know--but the difficulty in getting articles from the membership is the driving force behind the need to change.

So this month we not only have an eight page newsletter, we have an eight page newsletter with 12-point type. Last month we used 10-point type.

Microsoft Office Update In the October newsletter, I wrote about installing Windows XP SP2, which is supposed to reduce the chance of various malicious attacks being successful. There were also Microsoft Office updates out that you were supposed to install for similar reasons. The Office updates, as best I can recall, went OK on all the computers in the house except for the one upstairs running Windows Me and with Office 2000 Premium installed.

On that computer, I connected to the Microsoft site and went to the Office section, where a search of updates yielded that to get SP3, I had to first install SP1a. So let the download begin. After it ended, and the update began to install I received the message “The file E:\data1.msi is not a valid installation package for the product Microsoft Office 2000 SR-1 Premium,” or something close to that. My first thought was that I had put in the wrong version of Office since I had about three different CDs with Office 2000. But a try with the others produced the same error. And the one I originally used had written on its sleeve that it was for this particular computer. Time to go to Google, which produced something from Microsoft’s site stating the following:

“CAUSE: This issue occurs if you have Microsoft Works Suite 2000 with Microsoft Word 2000 installed on your computer. The Office 2000 SP-3 Setup program searches for the earliest version of Data1.msi, and Data1.msi for Works 2000 is not compatible with the SP-3 Setup program.” I was trying to install SP1a, but I was sure it was the same problem.

Well, Works had come installed on this computer, and it was a version of Works that contained Word. Microsoft’s solution to the problem--an hour of work: First, completely uninstall Works. This was not a quick as it sounds. There were all sorts of programs, like a mapping program, that the computer considers as part of Works. I think I had to uninstall about six programs to get rid of Works. Second, you do a normal uninstall of Office 2000, including Publisher. But that is not the end of it. There are two utilities you must download to remove the remaining Office 2000 CD1 files and the remaining Office 2000 CD2 files. After all of this you can then reinstall Office 2000 Premium. But be warned, you now have to go back to the Microsoft site and get the SP3 update. The SP1a update that it tried to first install was based on the erroneous information that having Works on the computer caused. Keeping up-to-date is not easy.

Missing Floppy As you may recall, I helped my sister with the purchase of a new Compaq computer several months back. It has taken several trips to visit her to get everything up and running perfectly.

One thing I had put off until the most recent trip was to see why she had no 3.5 floppy listed. When she first received the computer and booted it for the first time, she received an error message regarding the floppy. Since she didn’t really need the floppy at the time, I had her go into the BIOS setup and disable the reference to such a floppy. That way she didn’t have to look at the error message every time the computer started.

This trip, I decided to take the cover off the computer and see if what I suspected was true--that the floppy drive was not connected. Sure enough, when the computer's side cover was removed there was the floppy’s power cord dangling. Guess that those Compaq assemblers in Mexico had been drinking too much Tequila. Once connected and the reference set to it in the BIOS, everything was fine with the 3.5 floppy drive.

I think most computers now come without such drives. That certainly is the case for laptops. I suppose in the day of USB thumb drives and cheap CDs, there isn’t much need for them. But my sister had backed up many things to floppy disks over the years that she needed such a drive to transfer the files to the new computer.

Adobe Streamline is a handy piece of software for those involved with graphical work. It will transform a raster graphic (bitmap) into a vector graphic (line art). Tiff and JPEG files are examples of raster graphics. They are pixel-based and cannot be enlarged without losing quality. Encapsulated Postscript files (EPS) and Adobe Illustrator (AI) files are vector based and can be resized without any loss in quality.

Not all raster graphics lend themselves equally to being made into vector graphics. At this point, I have done very little with Streamline, but I quickly discovered that black and white images are far easier to change to vector graphics than are images with many colors. Also, if the image has text in it, you need the text to be quite large to achieve a good transformation.

As I work with the program, I should have more to say. One thing of note is the vast reduction in file size when going from a raster graphic to a vector graphic. You can go from several megabytes to just 20 or 30 kilobytes. In the example I had my best success with, the black and white image went from around 5 MB as a TIFF file to just 40 KB as an EPS file. That makes it a lot easier to send the file to a print shop, as this one was destined to go for use in a yard sign. u