Mountain View Computer Users Group

Beginner's SIG

We started the Beginner's SIG with a question and answer session, as usual (which we may should have skipped, as we started late, but...). Most of the discussion was centered around questions having to do with printing on ink jet printers. We learned that if you have an HP printer, the print heads are built into the ink cartridges. So if you swap out cartridges, say to put photo printing inks into your printer to print a few photos, then put the regular ink cartridges back in when you are finished, the photo ink cartridge's nozzles will begin to dry out now that the seal's been opened. If they dry out enough to clog the nozzles, it's pretty much unusable. However, we also found out that HP provides little "L-shaped" plastic brackets for storing your cartridges that will supposedly seal the print head nozzles for just this kind of scenario.

A question was posed askingif it was recommended to purchase a dedicated photo printer instead of printing photos with a regular desktop business/home ink jet printer. The answer to this came down to personal preference and practice. Basic business/home ink jets are designed to print documents with text, graphics, and yes, photos, but they are not optimized for printing high-quality photo prints because they use the basic CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) ink colors to create all the colors of your document. Photo printers add to those basic colors light versions of cyan and magenta, and some even shades of gray, so they are using six to nine different ink colors to print your photos. The inks are also optimized to print on photo-quality paper, whereas the basic ink jet printers are for printing on plain paper. If in practice you are printing out a lot of photo prints and you want higher quality results, then a dedicated photo printer might be for you. They are available in a wide range of prices and sizes. If you are only printing out an occasional photo, then the basic printer's photo setting and using photo paper designed for that printer will probably give you adequate results.

So where does personal preference come in? Jim Straight suggested to try printing out one of your nice photos with your basic printer using it's photo settings and photo paper and look at the results. If you feel that it did a good enough job for you, then okay. If you are dissatisfied with the results, then go shopping.

One extra thought, if you don't have a need for printing out lots of photos at home, but occasionally want prints to share, but your basic ink jet printer doesn't give you the results you'd like, there are many photo services that will take your digital photos and make photographic prints for you. Most only charge around 20¢ - some less - for a 4 x 6 print. Locally, Wallgreens, Wal-Mart, and Target all provide this service. You can even send your digital photos over the web and then pick up your prints at the local store.

Backups for Beginners

After our question and answer session, we dove into the all-important topic of backing up your data. Not a terribly exciting topic, perhaps, but one every computer user needs to be aware of and, if their data is important to them, practicing. This Beginner's SIG topic was the first part of two sessions scheduled this year addressing this topic.

Without going into a great deal of detail here, suffice it to say we had a very dynamic presentation/disscussion that lasted 40 to 45 minutes before we got to the General Meeting session. Basic information was presented on why we want to backup and what to backup. Three strategies of approaching backups were shared - Bare Minimum, Bootable-Backup Safety Net, and Archiving Static Data - to address the "What to backup?" question. There was a lot of interest and questions on this topic, as there should be on one so important to the whole computing experience. I ended the Beginner's SIG by plugging part 2 of the Backups for Beginners scheduled for Saturday, April 7 (according to the grid on our web site, which is incorrect, we discovered) at 9:30 a.m. Possible discussion/presentation points for that meeting might include more details on backup media, possible software recommendations (perhaps a short demo), alternate backup strategies (there are many to choose from), and most importantly, testing your backups.

On the date for the April meeting, it was pointed out that April 7 was the first, not the second Saturday in the month, and also Easter weekend, so the grid on the web site needs to be changed.

General Meeting

We spent about fifteen minutes in combined configuration to welcome new members, of which we had one. Jim Straight can provide the name of the gentleman, as well as attendance numbers for the day. We also introduced officers, including those not in attendance, and had reports from the Treasurer (again, Jim S. can provide the numbers) and Scholarship committee (Donne Puckle filled in for Roland and recruited volunteers for the Buena scholarship night January 24 - Eric Delk and Carolyn McClain will join Donne for that event). Windows SIG Chair Michael McClain gave a short plug for what the Windows SIG meeting would be covering, as did Dewey Coerper for the Macintosh SIG. We then briefly went over the future meeting schedule and topics through August. Again we pointed out April 7 was incorrect and the meeting would undoubtedly be Saturday, April 14 that month. There was also a request to move the second part of the Backup for Beginners session up so it was closer to the first part. John and the officers will need to address that question and decide if we want to change the schedule. Then, after announcing that Dr. John's Digital Photography 140 class at Cochise College had a second session available, we took a break to disperse into platform SIGs.

Windows SIG
(Submitted by Mike McClain)

The Windows Sig went well. I had one gentleman who couldn't stay who asked me how to backup his Firefox bookmarks and information. I got his email address and sent him that information, as I don't have Firefox on my laptop and didn't remember offhand where Firefox saves its files.

I started off fielding any questions regarding backing up data in Windows, and any general questions as well. I then did a fairly brief Powerpoint presentation on what Instant Messaging is, its history, its uses, and what some of the popular clients were. Then Carolyn and I did a demonstration between our two laptops using Yahoo Messenger, and also my using Windows Live Messenger. We had not set that up prior. so we were able to demonstrate how users could contact each other and add each other to their contact lists. I wound up with showing AIM, even though I didn't have anyone to actually connect to. By that time everyone was pretty well getting the idea, though. I fielded questions throughout the presentation, and we wound up just about the same time as Barry and Dewey. Everyone sounded happy with the presentation as they left.

Macintosh SIG

We started out by showing the latest "Get A Mac" commercial that was introduced at Steve Jobs keynote address at Macworld the previous week. Then a bit of Macworld news - the announcement of the iPhone and the posting of John Buono's blog from Macworld. John will bring us the details and more news from Macworld (as well as CES) in his report on February 10.

Then our new Mac SIG Chair, Dewey Coerper, introduced himself and told us of his background with using Macs since the late 1980s in publishing and education. His Backup the Mac presentation covered Macintosh backups in the corporate, graphic production, and personal use arenas. He gave us information on when to backup, using RAID systems to backup, and compared five backup software packages for the Mac OS - Apple Inc.'s Backup, EMC Insignia's Retrospect Desktop, Intego's Personal Backup, Prosoft Engineering's Data Backup, and Tri-Edre's Tri-Backup. He then followed up with a short discussion on Roxio's Toast and using it for part of a Mac users backup strategy and information on various types of backup media - RAID systems, extra hard drives, CDs, and DVDs. Dewey concluded his presentation reminding us to take the time to do comprehensive backups and the importance of reading the documentation that comes with the backup software we may personally choose to use.

There were numerous questions during and following the presentation. All in all, we came away with more knowledge of why, when, and how to make backups.

Respectfully submitted,
Barry Midgorden, Vice President

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