September 19, 2009 Mtg., Watered Down, Glynn Gillette, Presenter

Lon Hosford, President of the club, announced that the October club meeting will be a breakfast meeting to be held at the Clinton Country Griddle, 190 Center Street, off Rt. 31 N, in Clinton, 908-713-1200. Arrive between 8:30 and 9:00. Park in the commuter parking lot which is close to the restaurant and has more parking space available.

Lon also announced that future meetings will start at 9:00, rather than 8:30 as currently. The meetings will continue to be held at the Hunterdon Medical Center.

Members of the club were asked to please join our Yahoo group. Your email address is secure. The site is valuable for sharing news with other club members and for asking questions for help. If you prefer, you can give your name and email address to John Gbur and he will take care of adding you to the group on Yahoo.

Don Columbo has done a fantastic job of scheduling programs for the year. He is looking for topics for the coming year. Please send him any suggestions or mention them to him at the next club meeting.

Lon mentioned that videos he received which were taken at the tea parties were put on DVDs and he wanted to put them on the Internet. He asked members of the club how to do this. They recommended that he rename the files to “mpg” and they would work.

Another member mentioned that he was able to upgrade from dial-up to DSL. He found out from an Embarq employee that it was AOL that was blocking access to DSL. He was also able to get a great deal from Embarq by bundling his telephone service and Internet service.

Q&A

Q: I’m trying to access the internet through the phone line and a modem using dial-up on a laptop. The response is that there is too much current in the home loop so dial up access won’t work.
A: Call up Embarq and discuss the problem. Or go to DSL.com to ask questions.

Q: I’ve heard about Pure from Embarq that doesn’t need a phone line to access the internet.
A: Pure is broadband from Embarq that doesn’t need a phone line provided at a reasonable price. Check out the details at http://iwantpure.com/

Q: I’m using Google gmail and I am having trouble printing the email message only and not the advertising or other info shown on the screen. Is there an easy solution to printing only the email message?
A: Just select all the text in the email message you want to print; then click on the small page icon in the upper right corner of the screen and click on “print”. This will bring you to the print dialog box. From there just click “selection” and “print” and the text you selected will print without any of the other information on the page.

Q: Should I get a new computer now or wait until Windows 7 comes out?
A: Basically, October 22 is the release date of Windows 7.

John Warsinski commented that he has added GMail Drive to his computer. GMail Drive is a free virtual drive stored in a Gmail e-mail account. The user needs a Gmail email account to use this drive. This add-on enables the user to use the standard Windows desktop file copy and paste commands to transfer files to and from the Gmail account as if the drive were on the user’s computer. This drive can provide 7GB of internet storage space that can be used for backing up your computer or saving your files..

Presentation: Watered Down, Glynn Gillette, presenter

Glynn Gillette gave us a crash course in electricity and what makes our computer work. He described the composition of the motherboard and how the various components; such as resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, integrated circuits, batteries and switches, work. Speed is the most critical factor and the goal is to always increase the speed of the computer. Nanoseconds are too long. For more information, Google “How Things Work Electricity”. Thank you, Glynn.