Rich's Ramblings
by Rich Schinnell
Don't do it! Each year I seem to forget what I learned the last year. This loss
of memory seems to
come around January of each year. Last year I did the same thing. What is IT?
you say! Well I
received a call from our Intuit friends and was convinced to buy from them the
new version of
Turbo Tax for 1997. Each year I forget that it is always available locally for
a cheaper price.
The same with the Maryland state verion. So I did it again. Bought from Intuit
and for more
money than it was available locally. I thought I would get smarter as I got
older but somewhere
the memory cells have a parity error or something <G> Of course I am the
same one that did this
with the Word Perfect upgrades when they were upgrading almost every 12 months.
When will I
ever learn?
UPDATE:
A few months ago I purchased one of the Seagate 4/8 Gig IDE/ATAPI tape backups.
It was
bundled with the Seagate Backup Exec 2.0 software and I thought it was great.
It is good so I
thought that if I checked with Seagates home page HTTP://WWW.SEAGATE.COM to see if I
could get an upgrade pretty cheap or for free. No luck, In fact if you order
the latest version of
Seagate Backup Exec for Windows95 from their 800 number, you end up with an
inferior
product (Opinion here:). It seemed to have a lot of trouble with long file
names on my local
Novell and NT servers. I ended up re-installing the original software that I
had received with the
tape drive. No longer will I recommend the Backup Exec software directly from
Seagate. The
software that is shipped with the drive seems to be superior.
More on my Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server trials and tribulations. After
messing around
with the complimentary copy that MS had sent CPCUG for testing, I went out and
bought my
own copy of the Server version. It was well packaged, came with the latest
patch CDROM and MS Internet Explorer 4.0 <G>. Surprise Surprise... I installed it on one
of my machines in the
hope that I could setup an FTP server which I could access when I was out
visiting other people.
This way it could kind of replace my old BBS, which I had run for 15 years. I
tried lots of
different things, and finally got it to setup the RAS (Remote Access Server). I
learned a lot of
new things about dial-in and protocols. I finally am able to call in from
another machine using
the TCP/IP Dial Up Networking that comes standard with windows95. I get the
Connect
windows and it says that I am connected but I still have a ways to go to get
the FTP setup
correctly. I have been getting advice on the MIX BBS from Grant Ellsworth,
that's Susan's
husband who is a NT expert. I feel like a real newbie at all this and Grant is
very patient with
me. I also want to be able to setup a Web Server so that I can put up web pages
for dial in. See,
even when you get older you can still learn. Now if I would just read the
manuals and get this all
done.
I went out and bought one of the new HP Laser Jet 4000 printers. Sure is great and works like a charm. I bought it thru the purchasing agreement that president Milliner negotiated with CompUSA, saved me a small bit of money, but the profit margins on HP printers are not that great, But a dollar here and there adds up. Especially if you like toys like I do.<G> I donated my tank (Laser Jet Series II) to a friend who still had a dot matrix printer. The LJ 4000 puts pages out at 17 Pages Per Minute. Whew, it can eat up those reams of paper if you mess up. Well worth the $$$ that I spent on it. It was still about $500 less than I originally paid for the original HP LJ II which now owes me nothing.
Rich Schinnell is now just another volunteer as he has been for mostly the last 15 years with CPCUG. He enjoys helping people with their computer problems and most of the time he succeeds, sometimes he doesn't. He can be reached in the evenings at (301) 949 -9292 by members of CPCUG with computer problems. He is not afraid to ask you if you are backing up your data and you better be able to answer yes<G> Rich consults to a select list of small business's who seem to be quite happy with the results. He has a NT 4.0 network in his house that co-exists with his Novell Netware server. Most of the time..
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