PCWize Vol 4, Issue 02 - Fonterrific January 9, 1999 ______________________________________________________________________ I've decided to change the contest rules a little. Instead of a random drawing, I will give away prizes to people who submit something to PCWize that gets used. It can be a tip/trick, technology news item, cool site, or cool software. You don't even have to write an article about it, just give me a heads up. It's an easy way to win, gets you (the readers) more involved, and takes some of the workload off your poor, pitiful publisher! You will, of course, get full credit for the find. ------ No running commentary would be complete without a conclusion of sorts. Read the last entry for Leif's Laptop Quest. Find out what I liked and disliked about my new laptop now that I've had a chance to play with it. ------ Yesterday, I spent the whole day at a friend's house setting up his brand-spanking new entertainment system. He was pretty content to let me do most of the configuration of the components and system setup. I had a really great time! Later that night he pulled out his desktop machine and explained that he was trying to install a new CDR/RW and now his hard drive wouldn't work. The error he got was that the FAT32 partition was corrupt (which is a bad thing), and that upon booting with a floppy, FDISK wouldn't even touch the hard drive. It only took me a few minutes to determine the problem, and being a subtle one, I thought I'd share the info with you. Most systems come with two IDE busses, and they can either be marked as 0 and 1, or 1 and 2 depending on the manufacturer. My friend's problem was that during his installation, he had moved his boot drive over to the secondary IDE bus. A quick swap of the cables, and he was booting back up into Windows in no time. ______________________________________________________________________ TOC 1. Voting Booth and Other PCWize Stuff 2. Software Review 3. Cool Sites 4. Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's 5. That's the news! 6. Security Issues, Hoaxes, Viruses and Other Urban Legends If the columns in the below articles appear misaligned, it's because you are using a non-fixed width font. If you would like to see them nice and straight, change your e-mail font to Courier New. ______________________________________________________________________ ** A word from our sponsors ** ------ http://www.freecreditanalyzer.com - Get your credit situation analyzed online without affecting your credit report. ------ Want to see your advertisement here? For more information, go here: ______________________________________________________________________ 1. Voting Booth and Other PCWize Stuff ------ Click here to vote for PCWize as one of the best newsletters in the "E-zines Top Ten Poll"! It's just a click, no need to fill anything out. ------ Come visit the PCWize forum and live chat. You may discuss anything computer related and it's a good place to get help with any computer questions you may have. ______________________________________________________________________ 2. Software Review ------ Name: SpeedTec 2.0 by Montana Software Genre: Internet Connection Tools Platform: PC Windows 95/98 Type/Cost: Shareware / $14.95 USD Size: 358KB Homepage: Download: I think that I can safely say that we all want more speed out of our Internet connections. One way to do this is to change some default settings in the Windows Registry dealing with packet length, Time To Live (TTL), Receive Window (RWIN), and NDI cache size. I remember a while back playing with the MaxMTU and RWIN settings when all the hubub started about how great it was to change these. At the time, my ISP wasn't exactly the greatest- and it still isn't -but it does appears that they've gotten some more ducks in a row, because now I can actually see a difference in my connection speed. Gone are the days off messing with your registry manually because there are a good number of utilities to do this for you. Speeedtec has got to be one of the simplest I've ever used. If you're really geeky, SpeedTec lets you configure the options yourself, or if you're not so geeky, you can just hit the "Optimize" button. For me, it worked like a champ. Of course, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), but it's worth a shot. As always, any time you use software to (or even manually) change registry settings, you should make a backup of the registry data. Montana Software even makes this easy, as they've also written a utility called Rescue 911 which will do this for you. ______________________________________________________________________ 3. Cool Sites ------ Conspire Have you always wanted your own conspiracy theory, but just couldn't come up with one? Come on.. I know you do! Get your own personalized conspiracy theory based on inputs you provide. What you do with it after that is for you to decide. Is it worth risking your life to make it known to the world, or will you keep it a secret, and hope that one day someone will uncover the truth you worked so hard to find! ______________________________________________________________________ 4. Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's ------ I'm always playing with different fonts when making web pages or doing 2D/3D graphics. Something that that has always irritated me was that I had to use a font viewer or charmap.exe to see all the letters in the font. This was especially a pain when the font was of the ding variety (wingding, webding etc.) I've created a nice Word document that will let you see all the characters (including the ALT ones), which you can print out and keep in a folder. This has helped me immensely, as now I just open the folder and peruse the printed versions to find the character I want. The example I've created for you all to use is the fontdoc for WingDings. As mostly everyone will have this font installed, you can quickly gauge whether my tool will help you or not. Included in the ZIP file is instructions on how to use the fontdoc document. Download it here: http://www.pcwize.com/tech/computer/fontdoc.zip If you'd like to preview the fontmap tool in your browser, go here: http://www.pcwize.com/tech/computer/wingdings.doc Note, this may not display properly in Netscape Navigator, and I know it doesn't display correctly in Opera. Tell me what you think of it, and if you have any suggestions to make it better. ______________________________________________________________________ 5. That's the news! ------ Sizing in at ten times less than todays standards, FinFET transistors could allow electronics to be built with 400 times the number of transistors in the same space. What does this mean for us? More speed of course! ------ Little molecular machines on a search and destroy mission. This could be fun! Bob: "Bill dude! How's life? Did you get Biobug 2.35 yet?" Bill: "Hey Bob! No, I still have Biobug 2.34, I'll have to wait for payday to upgrade." Bob: "No way dude! I heard that some hacker from Sweden has cracked that. You might want to upgrade, or at least get the 2.34 cytoplastic redundancy patch." ______________________________________________________________________ 6. Security Issues, Hoaxes, Viruses and Other Urban Legends ------ Before we begin, let me define these for you: Security Issues: These are issues affecting your privacy and security while on the Internet. Most security risks that will be mentioned here are ones concerning holes in software which leak information or will allow people to gain access to private information. Viruses/Trojans/Worms: These will be *real* warnings about new viruses. If I'm warning you of a virus, then you can take it to the bank that I've fully checked its validity first. Hoaxes: The most memorable in all of your minds is most likely the Good Times Virus hoax. These are warnings about some new fangled virus that will wreck your life. The difference between this and other virus warnings is that they aren't for real. Their entire purpose is to scare people and bog down mail servers with all the forwarding going on. The reason I'll be telling you about them is so that you'll be in the know and won't forward them to everyone in your address book. Urban Legends: These are stories that will be computer related, but aren't necessarily virus related. A warning/story moves out of the hoaxes category when it keeps making a comeback. An example of an urban legend would be the one about the FCC allowing phone companies to charge for local access to the ISP in which the cost would be passed onto us as users. ------ No new bugs to talk about this week, but I do have some advice. Many paradigms have been broken over the last few months. Things like viruses now attacking .HLP files, and viruses/worms that can inadvertently be run by your e-mail software automatically when you click on the message to read it. McAfee is now recommending that you change your virus scanning options to scan *all* files as opposed to the ones we commonly think of as infectable i.e. .EXE, .COM, .DOC etc. They agree that it may be an inconvenience, and that you might notice some slowdowns, but I think we can all agree that a little trade-off is well worth the protection. ______________________________________________________________________ Well, that's it for this issue! Have a good week and I'll see you in seven days. Leif Gregory Copyright © 1997-00 by Leif Gregory. All rights reserved. You may share this copy of the PCWize newsletter with others as long as it is reprinted in it's entirety to include the copyright notice and subscription directions. If you've received this edition of the PCWize newsletter from a friend or colleague and wish to start receiving your own copy, then click the below link and send the generated e-mail message. I have made every attempt to ensure that all information contained in this newsletter is accurate to the best of my ability. Due to the myriad of possible configurations in the PC platform, information and software discussed here may not always work with your particular configuration. That being said, Leif Gregory and the PCWize newsletter can not be held liable for any damages you may incur either directly or indirectly from the use of anything contained in this newsletter. PCWize does not endorse any of the products or services provided by advertisers in this newsletter. As with anything in life, please check the credibility of the advertiser as well as to use common sense. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. PCWize Editor PCWize Homepage Unsubscribe