PCWize Vol 4, Issue 25 - This is a SUBJECT line! June 18, 2000 ______________________________________________________________________ You could win $10,000 and a Sony DVD player just by recommending PCWize to a friend! ------ Been wanting to get into 3D graphics, but either couldn't find a decent program or it was too costly? Get Strata3D for free-- a 25MB download, or for $39.00 you can get the boxed version mailed to you. Being the freebie nut I am, I tried to download it, but their server doesn't support resumes/broken downloads. This means that if your connection dies on the 24th MB, you'll have to start all over from the beginning. :-( ------ I've created a brand new PCWize forum on Delphi, because the old one was back in the VBOK days, and there were just some things I couldn't get converted to the PCWize name. It's the same great forum and live-chat with all the right variables. I'd really like to get the forum going, and I really haven't been pushing it in the past. You can discuss anything computer and Internet related, and discussions don't spontaneously start. Somebody has to take the first step. I've added a Hot Topics section to discuss things in the That's the News section and this general ramblings area, so if you've got opinions about anything here, let them be known to your fellow readers. I really wish I could publish the many great comments and questions I get via private e-mail from you all, but there just isn't room for it in the newsletter. Let's get discussing! ------ I'd like to see more readers send me links to their web sites and newsletters. You can get your site listed for all of the 2,000+ fellow readers to see just by getting the PCWize link button from the web site and sticking it on your web site. Then fire me an e-mail with the link to your site and where the PCWize link button is. That's it! Simple as milk. Here's one for Starduster's site ______________________________________________________________________ Table Of Contents - Voting Booth and Other PCWize Stuff - Software Review - Cool Sites - Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's - That's the news! - Security Issues, Hoaxes, Viruses and Other Urban Legends - PCWize Contests and winner announcement 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 as written, please change your e-mail font to Courier New. ______________________________________________________________________ ** A word from our sponsors ** ------ http://www.creditcardanalyzer.com - find out how much your credit cards are costing you and see how much money you could save by transferring the balance to a lower interest card ------ Want to see your advertisement here? For more information, go here: ______________________________________________________________________ HackTech by The NMI Is this all REALLY just a waste of time? ------ There's been a lot of talk lately about how much the Internet has "eaten up" more and more of our daily lives. I seem to hear it a lot - friends/coworkers talking about other people "S/He spends too much time on the Internet..." Some folks would have you believe the whole of society is going down the tubes, killing our skills of personal interaction, wiping out family time, you name it. Sure, some people may be bogged down with things they HAVE to do on the Internet. Others might spend a little more time getting the family familiar with the back of their heads than they should. Does this sound like any of you? :) Seriously, though - I'm tired of hearing how bad the Internet is, and I'm sure there are more good examples than bad: Maybe something about how the Internet has improved a person's life, educated them, perhaps even made them a better person. If you've read my past articles, you know by now that I learn a lot from the Internet. Perhaps you might recall the Russian language project I wrote about, and how the only resource I used was the web. Of the legion of interests I have, I've also learned new drawing techniques, different ways to shape molten glass into artwork, various ways of designing RF (radio frequency) circuits, the list could go on forever. The Internet has become my personal library, with the added bonus that I don't have to return any books . Do any of you have the same opinion as I do? Take it to the Hot Topics section of the PCWize Forum at . Tell me your opinion, is the Internet is an inevitable evil, sure to enslave humanity, or something else, a tool to be used to make yourself a little better. If you have specific examples, good or bad, tell us about it. I'll be publishing my findings in an upcoming article, and please keep in mind that I will be picking a few select examples from both sides of the coin, so if you don't want your name mentioned, please let me know. I might not get to reply in a hurry, as I am pretty late in the reply department, but I DO read every letter I get, so thanks to those of you that have already written in. You have to remember that despite what the corporations and companies want you to think, YOU, the people, are the Internet, and your opinion matters. It matters to me, also, and I eagerly await your responses. Thank you everyone! Send your praises, hate-mail, and PayPal donations to: TheNMI@PCWize.com ______________________________________________________________________ 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 can discuss anything computer related and it's a good place to get help with any computer questions you may have. ______________________________________________________________________ Software Review ------ Name: WinAMP v2.64 by Nullsoft Genre: Audio Players Platform: PC Windows 9x/NT Type/Cost: Freeware Size: 2.07MB Homepage: Download: Forget the Windows Media Player! I've used WinAMP for a while, but just recently went back to download the latest version; I was floored. It's come a long way baby, and it's takin' no prisoners. Totally skinnable, and totally plugable (read supports third party plugins), you've got your choice of over 10,000 skins and 150 plugins. If you can't find something in there to whet your appetite, then you should see a doctor. WinAMP will play audio files like MP3/MP2, MOD/S3M/XM/IT, MIDI/MID, WAV/VOC, CDA, WMA, AS/ASFS, and many more via plugin support. The basic package gets you a 10 band EQ, cool visual plugins, and a very worthy high-fidelity audio player. What's even better, is you can also get streaming audio from numerous "radio" stations (run by other WinAMP users) over the Internet with music in every category (3,000 of them at last count). You can also sign up for MyPlay's WinAMP locker, which is 3GB of on-line storage for your music so you can have it anywhere you go. No, that wasn't a typo! That's three gigabytes of storage. When freeware is this good, it just makes you feel tingly all over. ______________________________________________________________________ Cool Sites ------ Incredible Adventures Tired of the same old vacations and adventures? How about joining a covert ops team and learn evasive driving techniques, explosives and booby traps, and many other cool things? Maybe you'd rather go into space? Incredible Adventures will tell you where to go for more information on taking some pretty unbelievable trips. ______________________________________________________________________ Tips, Tricks, Do's and Don't Do's ------ *NOTE: The below tip isn't for the total beginner, but I've tried to explain in great detail in a step-by-step guide, so it wouldn't necessarily hurt you to follow along, and if deleting things from the Registry gives you the heavy-jeevies, then just skip over the deleting steps. You're bound to learn some neat stuff along the way. When you look at your taskbar, do you see a ton of little icons on the right-hand side? While programmers have gotten nicer by allowing us the option to have a particular application start when Windows starts, they don't always put it in the C:\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder. This makes it tough on the ungeek to stop the offending application from starting during Windows start, when you've the mind to change that. The first thing you want to do is determine which of the applications down there you can really do without. For example, unless you always listen to streaming media using RealPlayer every time you're connected to the Internet, then you don't really need the RealPlayer quickstart application on your tasktray. The first thing you'll want to try, is to right-click on the offending applications and see if there is a properties page. If so, check all the settings to see if there is a "Start when Windows start" checkbox. If so, uncheck it, and that's that for that particular application. For those that don't have this option, write down the name of the application on your soon-to-be-nixed list. The next step is to hit the CTRL-ALT-DEL keys simultaneously-- only once though, otherwise you'll soft reboot your machine, and take a look at what is running in the background. In addition to the things you already see in the taskbar/tasktray, you'll see all sorts of other things going. For now, if you recognize something right off that you don't want loaded at startup, add that to your list. If you don't recognize it, then don't worry about it right now. Sooner or later, I'll come out with a detailed list of what some of that stuff is. For those of you who don't know, when talking about the taskbar, there are actually multiple parts to it. The term taskbar actually only concerns the area which shows you which applications are currently open. The little block to the far right, is called the tasktray, and the little block sandwiched between the Start button and the taskbar-- which usually gets the default IE, desktop and a couple of other buttons, is called the quicklaunch toolbar. However, the term taskbar is often used to describe the entire shebang. Take a quick peek at the taskbar settings by right-clicking on it and seeing what toolbars are checked off under the Toolbars sliding menu. You should be able to identify what parts are what. Ahem, sorry for the tangent. Ok, now with our list of soon-to-be-nixed startup programs, let's dive into the Registry settings. Click the Start button and select Run. Type in regedit.exe, and an application similar to Explorer will open. By clicking the plusses in front of the items in the left-hand column, you'll be able to navigate down to all sorts of keys. The one we are looking for is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion This is a great key to dink with when you've got the time and the guts. For now, though, we are only concerned with two keys called Run and RunServices. The other Run keys-- RunOnce, RunOnceEx, and RunServicesOnce shouldn't have anything in them, as they are used during the installation of new software and drivers-- You know, the old "You must restart Windows to continue" pain. As I always say "Make a back-up before you mess with the registry", and this is a very simple thing to do in general, but we're even going to make it simpler, because we're only going to be editing the Run and RunServices keys. First, select the Run key by clicking on it, then go to Registry/Export Registry File in the menu. Pick an easy to remember directory to save it to, and name it something like Run-Before_I_Broke_It. Next do the same to the RunServices key making sure you name it differently than the saved Run key. What you have now, is two keys in whatever directory you saved them in, that contain the current configuration of those two keys. If something goes wrong, you can just go to that directory and double-click the saved keys, answer Yes to the question about adding the information to the Registry, and you'll have your old configuration back. Now, take out that handy-dandy list of soon-to-be-nixed startup programs and start matching them to items contained in the Run and RunServices key-- You'll be looking in the right-hand pane after selecting either of these two keys. When you've got a match, select it from the right-hand pane and hit the Delete key and answer Yes to the "Are you sure you want to delete this value?" question. If you don't know what something is, or even if you think you know what it is, but aren't sure you should delete it, then don't. It's better to err on the side of caution when playing with the Registry. Now that you're done nixing all the stuff that needs to be nixed. How do you save your changes? Surprise, there is no File/Save;Save-As command. Just close Regedit and the changes are saved. For future reference, if you've done something to the desktop, the changes should take affect as soon as Regedit closes, but you can force it with an F5 key, which is to refresh the desktop. Now, reboot your machine, and if you nixed a bunch of stuff, you might see a faster reboot time. At the minimum, you'll notice a much leaner tasktray area. Ok, now that you know the hard way, Click the Start button, select Run, then type in MSCONFIG, select the Startup tab and check or uncheck items until your heart is content. I just wanted to see if you read the directions first, or if you do 'em as you read 'em. If you feel slighted, you can double-click the two keys you saved earlier to get back to where you started. :^) ______________________________________________________________________ That's the news! ------ Almost Trekkie, but not quite! Remember those ultra-cool picture frames on peoples desks and dressers in Star Trek TNG that show more than just a picture? Weave Innovations, Inc. has come out with one that is almost as cool. No, it won't play any home movies, but it'll keep roughly 36 pictures in a framed picture for display around the house. It uses an LCD screen for display and can accept pictures from Flashmedia as well as the Internet. Being that LCD screens can eat up quite a bit of juice, my only question is whether it always has to be plugged into a wall. You can even set it up to retrieve news and weather from StoryBox for up-to-the-minute information. ------ There is still much debate as to the impact of the Microsoft break-up, and it appears equally divided between those who think Microsoft is evil, and those who think that Microsoft was sucker-punched. I see valid points from both camps, as I believe that there are quite a few things that Microsoft did that deserved punishment-- although I don't think a break-up was warranted. Heavily fined, yes, splitting, no. But I also believe that the Internet has changed the way we do computing, and as such, new solutions and new thinking were inevitable. Sure, Microsoft made it difficult to obtain a new machine without the Microsoft OS and bundled browser, but I don't blame Microsoft for this. I don't blame the OEMs either. People are in business to make money, and they make money by providing what consumers want. If nobody wants something, then they won't buy it, and the business will either need to adapt or go under. So who do I blame? Us, the consumers. I don't blame all consumers, but the vast majority of them. Let me explain why. When I started PCWize (back then it was called VBOK), I used to run tons of polls. Every week there was a new poll, and I begged, pleaded, and cajoled my readers to participate. Of the nearly thousand readers (back then), I would get on the average of 25 to 30 responses. Those 25 to 30 responders were pretty much the same people who consistently wrote in to let us know how we were doing, provide comments on things said in the newsletter, and give us heads up on neat things they ran across on the Internet. As loud as they spoke, figuratively speaking, they are the minority. Actions often speak louder than words, and the unspoken majority showed their approval for Microsoft by using their products and shunning the others. The funny thing is that they didn't even actively shun the others. They did it by accepting what came with their machine and didn't even attempt to try out something different. I feel qualified to say this, because of the hundreds upon hundreds of machines I have fixed for people, only a very few had software installed that wasn't bundled with their machine. I'm not talking about games, but core applications like Mail User Agents (MUA)-- that's an e-mail program, browsers, news readers, multimedia players etc. I'm not even going to mention the MS Office suite. Oops, guess I mentioned it! Upon asking many of these people why they use Outlook or Outlook Express, the answer was almost always "It was there and I got used to it." Same goes for the other software genres I mentioned above. To further this insight, I then showed most of them what other software could do. Stuff like Agent, The Bat!, Eudora, WinAMP, Opera and many others. While most of them agreed that the "other" software had definite advantages, they were reluctant to install them on their own machine. Why? Because they didn't want to have to learn new software. This is why I blame the consumers. Here is another area where I blame consumers. Most of you will agree that things like IE, Netscape Navigator, Outlook, and Outlook Express are bloatware-- meaning they try to be everything. For example, in addition to sending and receiving e-mail, Outlook also has a calendar, contacts (a glorified e-mail address book), a tasks list, a notepad, and a journal. Now some of you might actually use all this stuff, but most of the people I know don't-- we're talking hundreds of people whose computers I've repaired. There is another kind of bloat called idiot lights. These are warnings and hand-holding built into many pieces of software. I won't deny that for new people using the software, that this is sometimes necessary, but let me bring up an example to clarify my point. My favorite e-mail program (MUA) is called The Bat! by RITLabs. It's my favorite due to three things. The first is that it unbelievably flexible and powerful. Secondly, the developers really listen to the consumers to fix bugs and implement useful features. And finally, there is very, very little bloat which makes it a nice compact 1.3MB download. I'm not going to tell you that The Bat! is the end-all-be-all of MUAs, because it wasn't really designed for the beginner in mind. It was developed for people who didn't need the hand-holding and coddling, and therefore focused on power and flexibility. The Bat! has become a very popular piece of software now, and like all other businesses, they must make money. This has led to some unfortunate inclusions into the code to help beginners, and this has led to the most arguments on the discussion lists that I run and moderate. Let me tell you about the latest inclusion that RITLabs has bent to. There were some people who thought that The Bat! should halt all processing and alert the user if they forgot to put in a SUBJECT line before sending the e-mail. Much to the dismay of the majority of The Bat! users, a warning dialog box now pops up to tell you that you've forgotten to include a SUBJECT line when trying to send an e-mail without one. Personally, I've never seen this dialog, because I think it's my responsibility to put in a SUBJECT line, and therefore I don't forget to put one in. I mean, come on! We as humans need to take a little responsibility for ourselves. I can understand a warning box popping up because you didn't put a recipient in the TO, CC, or BCC line. How is the e-mail program to know whom to send it to? But does a SUBECT line really matter? RFC-822 states that a SUBJECT line is not necessary to comply with "standards", but there *must* be a recipient to send it to. Yes, it is netiquette to include a SUBJECT line, and that's why I always do, but I sure as heck don't need extra code to check to make sure I put one in. At any rate, I had no intention of getting this in-depth, nor of getting up on a soapbox, but I did it anyway. You want to compute your way? Then take a stand and say so! We all have different needs, but how ridiculous do software developers have to get to try and please everyone. Computers aren't going away, learn them, experiment with them, but above all, have fun with them. The entire reason we write PCWize is to help you to learn about computers and the Internet. TheNMI and I spend hours upon hours each week answering questions and writing various things to teach others. Take advantage of it. There are many others out there like us. Seek them out and learn. When you've gotten a good handle on it, pass on your knowledge. There will always be people who need the help. What do you think? Am I full of it, full of myself, or do I make sense. Let me and your fellow readers know at the PCWize Forum under the Hot Topics section. ______________________________________________________________________ Security Issues, Hoaxes, Viruses and Other Urban Legends ------ Please visit http://www.pcwize.com/tech/computer/secdef.shtml if you would like to know the definitions for hoaxes, viruses, worms and urban legends. ------ A few AOL employee's computers were compromised just recently and access to AOL's Customer Relations Information System (CRIS) was gained. A hacker with access to CRIS can do some pretty nasty things, the least of which is examining all your personal account information. Go here for more: ------ Jack Straw might be the last straw! If you don't know who this guy is, you might want to find out real quick. Your private data might not be private anymore-- even if you use encryption software. If this proposed bill becomes law in Britain, it could affect you even if you aren't living there. Some points to remember while reading the article: - They may not be able to force you to reveal your PGP key, but the person with whom you are communicating with in Britain could be forced to give up theirs. - If the web site you are trying to reach takes your connection on a hop through Britain, your movements could be logged. - If it passes, might other countries try and follow the precedent? After you take a look, jump on over to the PCWize Forum under Hot Topics to share what you think! See the whole story: ______________________________________________________________________ PCWize Contests and Winner Announcement ------ Each week PCWize holds a random drawing contest and gives away free stuff (usually software) to its subscribers. We will continue to do this as long as there are advertisers who are willing to provide the prizes. If you are such an individual/company, then please contact me at editor@pcwize.com so that we can work a deal. ------ The winner of this week's random drawing contest is: Omar Duval ______________________________________________________________________ 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