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- Why Upgrade?
- What can be Upgraded (Laptops & Desktops)
- Considering compatibility before purchasing upgrade components
- Performing a Hard Drive Upgrade of Franks Laptop
- Performing a Memory Upgrade of Franks & My Laptops
- Restoring the Image of Franks original Hard Drive onto my test Hard Drive
- Comparing the differences of the upgrade (Time Permitting)
Michael
If you have always wondered how to perform hardware upgrades, but were afraid to try, then this is the meeting for you!
Peter
Apologies for absence were received from John Rye, Paul Moore and Dick Williams.
The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. Matters arising included a reference to the Ipswich computer club. The Secretary was asked to find out if they were still operating.
The following Officers were re-elected unopposed
Chairman: Gareth Woolridge
Vice Chairman: Michael Peck
Secretary: Peter Dunn
Treasurer; Frank Watkinson
EAUG Liaison: Frank Watkinson
Gareth continues to produce Newsletter copy from the meetings and Peter continues to issue the Newsletters and manage the website.
The Chairman's report is printed in full here:-
Chairman's Report
Another 12 months have passed for the Iceni club, and although we continue to be few in numbers I hope our meetings have continued to be both informative and fun for all those who have attended.
In May 2009 we started the year at Iceni with an ever popular slideshow evening. On this occasion Gareth showed us slides from his road trip round Scotland and the Western Isles, Frank showed us some wonderful pictures of Orchids and his trip to St Petersburg, and Michael of a Mediterranean cruise. Peter had a selection of albums in and around Suffolk from Bawdsey and Snape to the butterfly enclosure at Jimmy's farm, and John wrapped up the evening with pictures from a 4 day coach trip to a number of German markets.
Peter gave a talk in June on anti spyware, AntiVirus and registry cleaners which provided and in depth insight into the breadth of tools available to keep a Windows XP system running well and clean of infections. Michael was also able to show us some of the tools he uses, together with a very brief look at the then pre-release Windows 7.
In July Gareth and Michael presented an evening on Media Streaming in the home which provided an introduction into streaming audio and video from a PC to other devices. On the night we looked at solutions such as XBMC - Xbox Media Centre, Apple's Front Row and Microsoft Windows 7 Media Centre. For streaming music online legally Michael also gave an overview of the new service Spotify.
August was the first of our yearly social evenings with a meal at the Brantham Bull. Although the venue didn't make the bill paying quite as simple as we first planned we had a good evening with some lively conversation, and as ever it was good to catch up with Royal.
In September we got back to hardware when Michael introduced us to all the components of a typical modern PC and step by step we constructed the PC as the evening progressed. By the end of the evening we were able to verify the system by installing Windows 7 Release Candidate and quickly looking at the new version of Windows.
In October Frank gave an overview on RISC OS applications ported to Windows. Software discussed and demonstrated on the evening were Ovation Pro, DPScan and Accountz with a look at the functional differences across platforms, and file compatibility.
Gareth presented an evening on Social Networking in November, with a whirlwind tour of many web base applications from MySpace and Facebook, to blogging tools such as Wordpress and LiveJournal. We also looked at picture and video sharing/blogging sites such as YouTube and Flickr and ended the evening with Twitter, a popular microblogging tool.
December was once again our popular "Gadgets" evening together with some Christmas refreshments. We had a number of gadgets from electric screwdrivers and LED torches to digital photo frames while enjoying cheese and biscuits and mince pies.
January was our New Year social evening and saw us return to the Tower Hotel in Dovercourt for an excellent meal and thoroughly enjoyable evening organised by Royal.
In February Michael provided a thorough overview of the now released Windows 7 which built upon a number of impromptu introductions to the beta and Release Candidate during the year. Here we looked the various versions available and the differences between them in terms of features and requirements.
Rounding out our year in March, Gareth presented the other side of the coin to February with a detailed looked at the new Apple Operating System release - Mac OS X 1.6 aka Snow Leopard.
I hope we have all enjoyed the varied programme this year and have benefitted from the topics we have presented. As ever I must thank everyone who has helped with the running of the club over the course of the last 12 months both in presenting topics at our monthly evenings and to Frank, Peter and Royal for 2 very enjoyable social evenings.
My thanks also to Frank for formalising his role in managing our finances following Tony's death as we continue to remain on a sound footing for the time being despite the small size of the club. We should also take a moment to remember our dear friend Tony as we mark two years since his passing.
Once again I'll end with a request for help in planning our future topics be it a subject you would like to present to us or just an idea that a fellow club member could take on board to discuss.
I look forward to another 12 months of interesting topics and discussion on all things RISC OS, Windows and Linux.
Gareth
Treasurer's report:
Reported here in summary:
The Treasurer said that our finances were in good shape. We had seven subscriptions last year and one visitor donation. We started the year with £199.34 and ended it with £253.35 a profit of £54.01. Our main outgoing was for rental of £75 and a donation of a bouquet of flowers was made for Ann Lister in remembrance of Tony. Total expenditure £87.99
The Treasurer recommended that subscriptions stay at their present level in case the club circumstances changed. Currently we had no outside speakers and it was felt that it would be difficult to invite someone to travel long distance for a very small audience. Our projector was also working well and we had not had cause to purchase a replacement lamp . We had no future purchases to consider. Frank also distributed a full list of transactions. The report was accepted nem con.
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After the formal business we should have had updates on Software. However for various reasons this was not possible and will be held over until a later meeting. Instead we had a general discussion on various computing topics. Frank described his Windows laptop which has a facility for defragging solid state drives SSD done in background once per week it takes about 10 mins. It costs £10.99 (SSD are Hard drives Flash based very small very fast and currently very expensive 256GB £500 30GB £80 -100 but with 250MB/s R/W ). Michael said these were now very fast . Acronis True image was also useful for backing up to an external drive. This will be useful for the next meeting.
Peter asked about location of System restore files these are held in a hidden file under C: root directory.
Frank has installed !Reporter on his Iyonix to monitor the boot process. It seems to have made it more stable.
Peter had a problem (not serious) with an added hour to the time stamp when transferring files from Windows to RPC using Omni which is a bit curious since both machine clocks appear identical and running BST.
!PDF had corrupted Frank's PDF spreadsheets for Peter. Frank thought there were peculiarities in the RISCOS reader and one should check with Adobe versions.
eml files with uuencoded blocks were also problematic, but can be used with attacher as long as the whole mail message including headers is converted. David Holdens Cut and Join program was also very good for splitting large files. Frank pointed out that starting a drag and then clicking the right mouse button (Adjust) where you wanted the end point to be would highlight the whole file in between. Peter had found Cut and Join useful to retrieve large files from Pluto which it had been unable to allocate memory for and had then dumped.
My thanks to everyone who has continued to support the club throughout the year attending and presenting our monthly calendar, and of course joining us at our social events.
As ever please feel free to suggest further topics that you would be interested to hear about, or that you would like to present during the next year.
I look forward to working with the Committee and all members to make the next year enjoyable for all at Iceni.
Gareth
| 2010 | ||
| 19 May | "How to replace a Hard drive - Hardware Upgrades, etc." | Michael |
| 16 June | "Broadband technologies" including SMTP email encryption on Windows/Mac/Linux |
All |
| 21 July | "Tips and tricks in Windows/Mac/Linux/RISC OS- and what is the function of the Registry?" |
All |
| 18 August | Social Evening - Venue TBA | All |
| 15 September | Digital Photography and How to manage your photo collection | Gareth et al |
| 20 October | Slide show evening | All |
| 17 November | "How to rebuild a RISCOS machine." -making one machine from parts of two Risc PCs. |
Frank, Gareth and Peter |
| 15 December | Gadgets and Party evening | All |
| 2011 | ||
| 19 January | Social Evening - Venue TBA | All |
| 16 February | Gigabit Networking , USB2 & 3 | All |
| 16 March | Linux update | Gareth |
| 20 April | AGM plus Games | All |
Meetings are now on the Third Wednesday of the month unless otherwise stated.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2·50. The membership fee is £20 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events, there is now a full list of meetings up to the end of the year on their website.
http://www.eaug.org.uk/mtg.htm
Tea/coffee/biscuits usually available.
Visitors pay 2.00 GBP for the evening, which is deductible from the normal joining subscription if you decide to join at a later date.
See the Membership page of the website for more information:
http://www.eaug.org.uk/mem.htm
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.eaug.org.uk or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.eaug.org.uk/ppl.htm
More on this next month. The have moved premises and also changed their name.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
However many household insurance policies will include cover away from home often with no increase in premium. (Ed.)
If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website.
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk