The LangaList 12-Jul-99 A Free Email Newsletter from Fred Langa About BrowserTune, HotSpots, Columns, Tips & Tricks, and Other Activities In This Issue: Zap! You're Dead! More on: The Best Search Engines Warning! Office 2000 CD#2 Bad? BT2K Demo's Final Hours IE Install Error Y2K Pendulum Swings Too Far the Other Way Yes, Yes, Yes! Just For Grins More! Zap! You're Dead! Last week (on July 5th, 1999), a series of powerful storms ripped across the Northeast United States. Here in New Hampshire, where I live, a significant portion of the state's population lost power and phone service as hurricane- strength winds from thunderstorm "microbursts" blew down trees everywhere. Normally, I'm pretty careful about storms. My house is on a hill that's a regular target for lightning. Last summer, a bolt struck a large boulder in our yard about 100' from our house: We found 50-pound chunks of granite shrapnel in our driveway after the storm. (We surmised that the lightning's energy caused rain water in a crack in the rock to flash to steam, blowing the rock apart with astonishing force.) Last week, the storms arrived faster and with greater strength than predicted. I'd left my office in the late afternoon and gone to pick up my kids at their summer camp; I left my PCs on because I intended to resume work when I got back---and the storms weren't supposed to arrive for several hours. But as we drove home, a charcoal-gray storm boiled up on the horizon and a gusty wind started blowing. As the cloud reared high and higher, it began to look like a Hollywood special effect: Most of the cloud was nearly black, but there were eerie greenish sections. I knew from past experience that this indicated that (literally) megatons of water were on the way down. We didn't make it home in time. The storm broke with an unbelievable lightning display, torrents of rain that cut visibility to literally just a few feet, and very high winds. I half expected to look up and see a squadron of flying monkeys making their way across the sky on their way back to Oz. When we got home, the power had been flickering on and off for a while and the rugs were soaked near the windows I'd left open. As we ran around battening the figurative hatches and shutting down everything electronic, two lightning bolts struck near our house. One was close enough that sparks flew from an electrical outlet--- a sure sign of a huge transient overvoltage in our home wiring. When the storm finally passed, the power returned. (We have underground power lines, immune from falling trees..) We lost phone and cable service for a while: The cable came back a short while later but the phone stayed out. As I write this, six days later on July 12th, the phone still is out! Work crews from as far away as Canada were called in to help repair the state-wide damage, but it'll still be a while before everything's restored. (I'm transmitting this column by cable modem; my phone-line modems are also still out.) Clearly, it was a vicious storm. But here's the good news: My home office equipment---the PCs, faxes, modems, etc., and all the hardware I depend on to make my living as a freelance writer---sailed through with no problem, even though they were left on and running during the worst of the storm. You see, all my essential office equipment is on an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS); a device that offers a high-level of protection against overvoltages ("surges") in the power supply; and that also kicks in with a battery- powered backup power supply when the house electricity supply fails or suffers undervoltages ("sags"). The secondary equipment in my office is protected with a heavy-duty line-voltage regulator. If the power goes out completely, these nonessential devices shut down; but the line voltage regulator thoroughly protects them from surges and sags. I do not---repeat NOT--- rely on those cheap $8 surge strips you can get at a department store. Ask any power expert: They'll tell you that cheap power strips are mostly junk. At best, they can protect your equipment from only the most trivial of surges (ones that your PC power supply can easily handle on its own). But for as little as $15-20, you can get a strip that actually does something and that even offers an automatic *$25,000 insurance policy* for your electrical equipment! For just a bit more---$25-30---you can actually get a pretty decent level of protection. $50-100 range gets you professional levels of protection, and for as little as $100, you can get an excellent battery-backup UPS that not only will protect your PC from surges and sags, but can even keep you going when the power completely fails! Chances are, you're one of the 93% of people with no real electrical protection for your PC. (And you're NOT protected if all you have is a cheap surge strip that came with no guarantee or insurance policy--- those strips are all but worthless!) If you are indeed in that 93%, think about the total value of your PC, monitor and peripherals---and the value of the data that's on your PC. You can protect it all for about $15-100. Isn't it worth it? It sure is for me: I'd be out of business right now if it weren't for my UPS and heavy-duty protectors. In this week's WinMag Dialog box column, I'll give you my tips and tricks for picking surge protectors, and lots more info, too. Plus, the WinMag editors have created a special package of additional information you can use to simply click your way to additional background info, product reviews, and more. They've made it as easy as possible for you to get exactly what you need to be protected from storms, blackouts, brownouts, Y2K problems or whatever kind of power problem next rolls through your area! Check out the other resources the WinMag editors have pulled together for you on the front page of this section, and then join in the discussion! Do you use a UPS or a high-quality surge suppressor? Which brands? Or if not, why not? Have you ever lost equipment to a power-related problem? Has a UPS or surge suppressor ever saved your hardware from a meltdown? Tell us about it! Join in for a week-long discussion via http://www.winmag.com/ ! --------------Please Visit This LangaList Sponsor!---------- Do your faxing by email! ­ it's NEW! Send, receive & manage faxes VIA EMAIL! The eFax Plus Package from eFax.com ­ - Send faxes while online ­ up to 90% faster - Route faxes - automatically - Convert faxes into editable files All for $2.95 a month + usage fees. http://www.efax.com/signup/premium.html Sign up by 7/31/99 & your 1st 3 months subscription is FREE! ------------------------------------------------------------ Discussion Continues: What's The Best Search Engine For Serious Searching? There are tons of great posts in the discussion on search engines--- suggestions for great narrow-, broad- and meta- focus search engines from readers all around the world! Join in! Of all the engines out there which ones have you found useful for serious research, and why? Which services let you cut through the clutter? Which ones give you results broad enough to be useful, but not so broad as to leave you drowning in data? Conversely, which ones are the dogs that return old data, dead links, or simply have too much noise and too little signal? Let's pool our knowledge: Join in the discussion at http://www.informationweek.com/langaletter Warning! Microsoft Office 2000 CD#2 May Be Bad! If you're thinking about Office 2000, or if you've already bought a copy, you need this info. It could save you a ton of grief, and help you avoid wasting money on useless tech support calls: It does look like something's definitely wrong with a significant number of O2K installs. Last week, I told you about reader Bruce Liddy's problems with "error #2355," which turned out to be a "corrupt cabinet." A cabinet is a compressed file format Microsoft uses to distribute files. (Windows trivia: Way back when Windows 95 was in early beta and still being called "Chicago," Microsoft experimented with a user interface that is like what we now call "Windows Explorer." It was basically File Manager on steroids---there was no desktop or start menu or task bar as we now know them. This was also in the days of small hard drives, and file compression was one of the options MS was looking at building into Chicago. Because the whole paradigm was managing files instead of managing a desktop, the idea of "cabinet files" came about: These were files within files, in a space-saving compressed format. Ultimately, Chicago's early UI approach was abandoned. Windows 95 gained a desktop UI metaphor and Windows Explorer became a simpler kind of file manager. But the cabinet---CAB---file format lived on as a software distribution technology. And now you know a bit of Windows arcane most people have never heard of!) Anyway, the CAB format is fine, when it works. But there's circumstantial evidence that the many copies of Office 2000 have a flawed CD #2 that results in "Office1.cab" being reported as corrupt. The CAB itself doesn't seem to be the problem---it appears to be a problem with the actual CD: a media problem caused by a bad master CD, perhaps, or a manufacturing defect. Some users have gotten around the problem by copying CD #2 to their hard drive and installing from there; others have used CD burners to clone CD #2, and then used the clone CD to complete the install. Still others, on LANs, have used a CD on a remote machine to install Office on a local machine that can't properly read CD#2. But, depending on the vagaries of your particular CD ROM, these approaches may not work: some CD ROMs can't read CD #2's Office1.cab correctly at all (and thus can't even copy it to another location). But others have no problem at all, and some of the rest can read it well enough to get a copy made (say, to a hard drive), but not well enough to use in a live install. There's nothing official posted yet on the Microsoft site, but some users reporting the problem have called Microsoft (some paying $35 a pop) and say that Microsoft acknowledges that something wrong, and that a fix will be forthcoming. All that is bad enough, but there may also be an entirely separate problem on CD #2 with its embedded serial number: Some users report they've run into trouble while installing fonts and Publisher. You have to call Microsoft to be given a new, correct serial number for this problem. Stay tuned here for more info. BT2KDemo's Final Hours When the new version of BT2K goes up, the results will not be directly comparable with those in the demo version because the core tests have all been upgraded and improved. So if you want to take the tried-and-true demo version for a spin, this is it! Check it out at http://www.browsertune.com/bt2kdemo/ Another Weird Install Error, But This Time With IE Reader Patrick Keswick writes to report weird installation error with Internet Explorer: I uninstalled IE 4.01, and then tried to reinstall it. However, I get an error message saying that I need 4.8 additional MB of free disk space to do so. I have 343 MB currently free on my hard drive. I have deleted programs up to 12 MB already, and it still tells me I need an additional 4.8 MB of free disk space to install. Help tells me to look up Free Disk Space, Increasing on the help topics, but I don't have that one listed. Do you have any solutions or ideas for me? Thanks for reading this. Sincerely Patrick Conspiracy theorists will assume this is a Microsoft plot to sell more hard drives--- but I'll bet it something simpler: some kind of disk error that's preventing the OS from seeing the amount of free space Patrick really has. Any time I get any kind of strangeness going on with a hard drive, I immediately stop (hey, it's my data we're fooling with!), run scandisk to look for and repair disk errors, and then run defrag as soon as possible. That helps ensure the disk's logical structure is OK, and that extensive file fragmentation isn't mucking up the works. ---------------- Please Visit This LangaList Sponsor! ------ InternationalTimes.com The World's Free Daily Print Newspaper. Get an 8 Page Fax-Style Newspaper Free. http://www.internationaltimes.com It looks and feels like a newspaper! It *is* a newspaper! The International Times is available in two ways, download from the Internet or receive it through e-mail, both in Adobe Acrobat format, allowing reproduction on any computer and printer. email: publisher@InternationalTimes.com ------------------------------------------------------------ Pendulum Swings Too Far the Other Way I got a kind-of snippy note from reader last week after he'd read my reference to the free Y2K self-test article in the last issue. I've been trying to fight Y2K hype for a long time now but his note made me think maybe things have gone too far the other way. He said (in part): I am surprised everyone is up in arms about Y2K. My son (who built my computer) said all you have to do is go to your clock, click on the date and ramp it up beyond 2000, if it does this, the computer is Y2K ready. This function does not use any fancy software, just a few clicks with a mouse. Alas, it's not quite that simple. Your PC keeps time three different ways (in the hardware, in the BIOS, and in the OS). Setting the clock the way this reader describes tests only the OS. A complete test looks at each level in turn and then checks to see if the levels interact properly with one another. It takes five tests to do this properly, not one. But even the five tests combined are very easy and only take about 5 minutes: As mentioned last issue, see http://www.winmag.com/library/1999/0101/fea0061.htm So no, there's no need to Y2K panic. You don't need to move to the woods, prepare 500 pounds of beef jerky or learn to cook roadkill. You probably don't even need to buy one of those Y2K-Fix-It programs. But it's not good to go too far the other way: Just because one of the three clocks in your PC works OK, don't assume you're fine. Take five minutes and run the free tests at the link above, and then you'll know for sure if your PC is OK or not. ---------------------- your ad here? ----------------------- It's more affordable than you think! See http://www.langa.com/rate_card.html ------------------------------------------------------------ Yes! Yes! Yes! OK, I don't mean to sound like Meg Ryan's famous restaurant scene, but it does feel good to see how many of you are continuing to use the fast, free "Recommend This Newsletter" link at http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm ! It's wonderful that so many of you want to share the LangaList with others. Do you know one other person who might find this newsletter interesting or useful? Click on over to http://www.langa.com/recommend.htm to see just how easy it is to send them a free copy, in your name. Thanks! Just For Grins: The top 14 ways things would be different if Microsoft built cars: 1. A particular model year of car wouldn't be available until AFTER that year, instead of before. 2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy a new car. 3. Occasionally your car would just die for no reason, and you'd have to restart it. For some strange reason, you would just accept this. 4. You could only have one person at a time in your car, unless you bought a car'95 or car NT, but then you'd have to buy more seats. 5. You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car... Wait a sec, it's that way NOW! 6. Sun Motorsystems would make a car that was solar powered, twice as reliable, 5 times as fast, but only ran on 5% of the roads. 7. The oil, alternator, gas, engine warning lights would be replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light. 8. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other brands for years. 9. We would still be waiting on the "6000 sux 58'" model to come out. 10. We'd all have to switch to Microsoft Gas (tm). 11. Lee Iacocca would be hired-on as Bill G.'s chauffeur. 12. The US government would be GETTING subsidies from an automaker, instead of GIVING them. 13. New seats will force everyone to have the same size butt. 14. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler would all be complaining because Microsoft was putting a radio in all its models. See you next issue! Best, Fred ( fred@langa.com )