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

Mary Sheridan, member at large, started the SIG portion of our meeting at 6:40 pm. We welcomed Mary back from her vacation to Maine.

As our first item of business, Don Patzsch reported that he was being cut off when doing wireless downloading from the Internet on his new laptop. After several suggestions as to why this may be happening, Don decided he would contact the dealer for a solution.

Mary advised the group that during our Nov. meeting we would submit nominees for next year’s officers. So far she has John Witmer accepting the nomination for president, Kevan Sheridan agreeing to accept vice-president, Mike Hodges and Doug Mullis agreeing to continue as treasurer and secretary respectively. Any of these nominees would welcome others volunteering or being nominated, also we need a nominee for member at large. Please express your interest in serving as an officer or submit nominees at the Nov. meeting. Fresh blood is healthy for the organization. Your group needs your service, and those who have served for more than a year need the break.

Mike Hodges, our treasurer, expressed appreciation for the fine job William LaMartin is doing with our newsletter and added that our financial situation is stable for the remainder of the year. Of concern, however, is the fact that we are losing members and therein revenue. Mike made a call for dues payments and suggested we try to attract new members.

Mary reminded the group of the upcoming Fall Conference of the Florida Association of Computer User Groups on Oct. 22, 2005 in Sarasota. This is a one-day meeting, with continental breakfast and lunch included, for $20. Learning how to maintain an active club and what others are doing will be beneficial to our members.

We are still settling into our new meeting place, and it was decided to delay a tour of the Pepin site until construction is completed toward the end of the year.

At 7:00 pm, Mary started the regular portion of our meeting by introducing Steve Singer of RDI-Tampa. Steve started by telling us some history of his involvement in supplying computer hardware beginning in 1978 when Apple ruled.

Steve displayed three Jetway motherboards and reflected he prefers AMD hardware to Intel. AMD uses two buses to divide the routing of tasks. Their chips utilize a dual core, which take advantage of the motherboard’s split bus for greater speed. The dual core CPU requires a 939 Chip socket and RAM must be filled in pairs, but SDRAM PC 100 and 133 can be utilized. Steve pointed out that the emphasis on chip speed has been redirected toward the dual core chips, as faster and faster chips were generating too much heat.

Steve offered an external disk drive case for housing a notebook hard drive for $35. He also demonstrated a portable two channel USB speaker system by Encore Electronics, featuring a 2” subwoofer and two 1” satellite speakers with self contained amplifier, for $29.95.

Steve invited us to visit his website,

http://www.morevalu.net or http://www.videoLAN.org, for free software and movies. He advised that we should periodically update the firmware of our CD and DVD burners to stay current with copyright coding.

Wireless router cards can now be obtained for as low as $35. The wired router should be a thing of the past. A couple new wireless standards are coming, n and nimo. Currently there are 811.02 a, b and g.

In conclusion, Steve donated the Encore speaker set as a door prize and invited members to come up and look at the hardware he had on display during the break.

Tickets for the two door prizes were sold during the break. The winners were: Bob LaFave - a copy of Partition Magic and Roger Waters - the Encore speakers.

The meeting adjourned about 9:00 pm. u