dacs.doc electric

Random Access
April 2001

by Bruce Preston

Members who are unable to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to askdacs@aol.com -- they will be presented at the meeting, and the response(s) will be placed in the Random Access column. Q. (askdacs) I have been using Windows 98 on my 700MHz Pentium w/ 128MB of RAM. Periodically I receive an error message noting that my memory resources have dropped to too low a level. This is detected by First Aid 97 software. It reports that GDI resources are below 20%, User resources are below 20%, System resources are below 20%, and Free Memory below 2%. What levels should I set for triggers, and what should I do? A. The consensus was to stop using First Aid 97--it has problems, and it consumes the very resources that it is complaining about. If you want to check to see where things are, just use the System Monitor that comes within Windows 95, 98, Me, NT and 2K. We don’t recommend running it all the time, but rather as a check tool. Q. (askdacs) In Win 98, my mouse has a tendency to free up for about five or six seconds. This is usually a minor inconvenience, but if I am using a sound-editing program (CoolEdit) to record music to a CD from a DAT it drops the music. I have to start recording at the beginning again. A. The first question was "Does he have a fast enough processor for conversion and burning?" We don’t know. We will assume that you do. The next thing to check is to make sure that DMA (Direct Memory Access) is activated for the devices (hard disk and CD-RW) involved. This means the devices need not bother the CPU for memory to device transfer. Lastly, it was recommended that you SCANDISK, then DEFRAG, then establish a very large fixed size swap file rather than the default dynamic swap file managed by Windows. The swap file size is controlled in Control Panel / System / Performance. Lastly, you might try slowing the write speed of the CD-RW down from 16X if that is what you are trying to burn at. Q. In Windows 2000 I do the shutdown request, it shuts down, but then it powers up on its own. What’s going on? A. Some motherboards support "Wake On Lan" and/or "Wake On Modem" which permit activity on the network card or the modem to wake the machine up. If you don’t want this feature, you have to go into the BIOS and disable it. Follow up revealed that you have a cable modem--and even though you have a firewall, yes, even an innocuous ‘ping’ will tickle the Wake On Lan capability. Q. I am running Windows 98 and System Tools reveals that the Kernel usage is high even though I am not really doing anything. Should Kernel usage by high when the machine is idle? A. No. It should be down under 5%. We suggest that you go get STARTSTOP, a completely free download from http://www.tfi-technology.com/startstop.htm and install it. It will give you the opportunity to control what gets started at boot time. Not to scare you, but if you are on a cable modem or a DSL line, you may want to check to make sure that you haven’t been hit by the "Bymer Internet Worm" which uses "spare" CPU cycles to try to break a coded message by brute-force calculations--it works its way into machines through the internet and then tries to solve a puzzle posed by an encryption vendor. If your anti-virus signature files are up to date, it should have found it. Q. Everything I read tells me that having TEMP files can really slow your machine down. Why do they exist, and why don’t they disappear? Why isn’t there an automatic way to get rid of them? A. Anything that is in your TEMP directory (C:\TEMP or C:\WINDOWS\TEMP) should be fair game for deletion immediately after booting. If you look at the creation date of a file in the temp folders, and the date and time is earlier than when you booted the machine--the file may be deleted. Files are often left there after doing an install, or if a program is shut down abnormally. Once you start an application, such as a word processor, it will create temporary files, and may hold them ‘open’ which means that you can’t (and shouldn’t!) delete them until the application closes. Q. Is anyone using the AT&T internet service at $4.95/month? Comments? A. Several people reported that it is just fine--if you can stand the advertising. You get 150 hours/month, six email addresses, and 60MB of space. You can’t get rid of the advertising; it is controlled by the dial-up connection for the service. If you get rid of the dial-up connection, or use a different dial-up connection, you can’t get in. Q. I have an IBM Aptiva with Windows 98. Should I leave it on when I am not using it, or just turn off the screen, or use the "suspend mode" option? A. There have been problems with "suspend mode" where it won’t start up properly, perhaps because the hard drive doesn’t come up to ready speed in time to reload the suspend image. We suggest that you leave the machine on all day, but turn it off when it is not going to be used for a long time, such as overnight. There are certain stresses put on the hard disk, the power supply and circuit boards when you start them up from a ‘cold’ state--enough that it is probably more cost and energy efficient to leave it on and idle. If your monitor has an energy saving feature that blanks the screen (rather than just activate a screen saver), then use it. Q. Is there any place where I can get a monitor repaired? Is it worth it? A. There had been a place in Brookfield that did it, but we haven’t seen him lately. There is also a company that shows up at some of the local ‘computer fairs’ that sells refurbished displays, but we haven’t seen him much lately either. That’s probably because the price for displays has come down so much that it just doesn’t make economic sense to repair them when they go bad. An exception is that you can sometimes find ‘new’ refurbished units--these are displays that were returned to the vendors immediately after being sold and repaired. They can not be sold as new, and are thus sold at a deep discount. You can sometimes find these on the internet, or at the occasional computer fair. Q. The keypad portion of my IBM desktop machine’s keyboard will not let me reliably type the ‘0’ key when I am in a DOS application. This causes a real problem when we are putting in costs. For Windows applications there has never been a problem. It is not a USB keyboard. Any suggestions? A. The idea that we could come up with is that perhaps you have inadvertently loaded a keyboard macro program in your DOS environment--such as the old SideKick, or Lightning applications--with these you can assign a sequence of characters to an arbitrary key and use it to emit one or more characters. This can even be done with the ANSI.SYS driver.