Minutes of the May Meeting
By Doug Mullis, Secretary, Tampa PC Users Group
dmullis@tampabay.rr.com
We skipped the usual SIG portion of our meeting due to Microsoft being our presenter for the evening. Pepin turned on the beer taps and our guests brought the pizza. A meeting not soon to be forgotten! John Witmer, our Vice President, served as Sgt
-at-Arms to make sure no one over-indulged. Actually John pulled double duty and conducted the meeting as our President, Kevan Sheridan, was without a speaking voice.Mr. Jerry Harris was introduced as a visitor. We hope Jerry will be back. William LaMartin asked members to please submit articles for the newsletter. None has been received in some time. Certainly things are happening out there that our members would like to read about. Please make the Editor’s job easier by sending articles.
Our much
-missed treasurer, Mike Hodges, was present and plans to be at our meetings until fall classes resume. John Witmer introduced the group officers. Doug Mullis asked that members wear their name tags at the meetings to help him put faces to names.Normal business being concluded, John Witmer introduced the Microsoft representatives, Greg Boyd and Blain Barton. A little later in the evening, Russ Fustino from Microsoft also joined us.
Topics focused on Internet security and new software coming out in the next couple of months. Business Contact Manager, Version II will be available in June. Security cannot be overemphasized, as there are lots of nasty things out there. It is hoped everyone has Service Pack 2 installed by now on XP. Updates are released the second Tuesday of each month. SP 2 has a removal tool for malicious software that scans your computer every time you download updates.
A good firewall and anti
-spy ware are also important to protect your PC. Without anti-spy ware, your computer will run slower and slower as spy ware accumulates. You can install multiple anti-spy ware tools, as one will catch things another misses; however, multiple firewalls will conflict with each other. Microsoft offers a free anti-spy ware, or you can also get Ad-aware or Spybot. Microsoft is also coming out with a new anti-virus.
Greg Boyd (in the above photo) demonstrated some small business software, such as Business Contact Manager. Russ Fustino distributed a DVD entitled MSDN Events DVD-ROM and indicated he was available to make presentations to user groups and even SIG’s. Greg is moving on to a new assignment, so we may not see him for a while.
Thank you Microsoft for an informative program and Bob LaFave for making the arrangements. The meeting adjourned about 8:40 pm. u