By Doug Mullis, Secretary, Tampa PC Users Group
dmullis@tampabay.rr.com

Kevan Sheridan, President, opened the SIG portion of our meeting at 6:30 pm by pointing out the different ways (web sites) we have for communicating with our members. We have our main web page http://www.tpcug.org, where you can find current club information and links. One link is to Amazon.com where your purchases made through the link benefit our group

Next we have our main e-group site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TPCUG we use for communication.

Then we have our Web Log, where past and current information about group activities can be found. To participate in the web log, first join BLOGGER (http://www.blogger.com ), then ask the page administrator for access to the Team Membership.

Finally, we have our MSN Groups pages: http://groups.msn.com/TampaPCUsersGroup; http://groups.msn/TPCUG; and http://groups.msn.com/BoardofTPCUG.. The first two are where the public can find information and links to our group. The last msn group is for Board members and is where online Board meetings are conducted.

Group meeting time and location can also be found at the sites of local newspapers and community web sites http://www.tbo.com and http://www.saintpetersburgtimes.com/.

At this point we began our regular meeting, as it was 7:00 pm. Kevan introduced our speaker, Gene Barlow of User Group Relations now in St George, UT. Gene informed us that their web site, http://www.usergroupstore.com, is organized into six divisions:

The first division is Organization Products, which includes Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0, Discovering Your Hard Drive Educational CD, Optimal Desktop Pro 4.0 and Spearit Move Me 2.5.

The second division, Backup Products, includes Acronis True Image 8.0 and Backing Up Your Hard Drive Educational CD.

The third division, Security Products, includes WhiteCanyon Secure Clean 4.0, WhiteCanyon Wipe Drive 3.0/Media Wiper, WhiteCanyon My Password Vault, Acronis Privacy Expert Suite 8.0 and Spearit Associate This.

The remaining divisions–Photo/Video Products, Text/Office Products, and Accessories–were not covered this evening. Gene demonstrated the products in the first three divisions, stressing the importance of backing up your hard drive weekly using incremental backups that use relatively little disk space and can be done very quickly. He recommends hard drive backup be done on an external hard drive using a USB 2 connection.

Gene then answered questions and offered the demonstrated software to our group at a discount from list prices. u