Computer
Info –
No Meeting This Week
Special Notice
Are
you getting tired of reading this message about the library replacing the
carpeting – well, guess what – here’s another message. The library has canceled the use of the
auditorium until June 12th.
Installing a Hard Drive
(Info
from Smart Computing June 2002)
On
the back of the hard rive you will see a power receptacle, a port for the IDE
cable, and a bunch of metal pins with one or more tiny pieces of plastic on
them. Those pins are jumpers, and you
use the plastic pieces to connect two pins and set the drive in a particular
mode, depending on the duty you expect to perform. Unless you plan to use two hard drives,
you’ll usually want to position the jumpers so the drive is in master mode. If you add another hard
drive or other device (like a CD drive), you will usually set it to slave when it is on the same IDE cable.
CS
(cable select) mode is the exception to the standard master/slave drive
configurations. It requires a special CS
IDE cable and a proper motherboard configuration to recognize CS devices (some
motherboards don’t). In this mode, you
set both devices attached to the same IDE cable in CS mode and the computer
will automatically detect which device is primary and which is secondary by its
position on the cable. The one on the
far end of the cable is the primary device, and the one in the middle is the
secondary device. You can use the traditional
master/slave settings on a CS cable, so when you are in doubt, always set the
primary drive to master and the secondary device to slave.
It
is not recommended to attach your CD drive to the same IDE cable as your
hard drive because an IDE controllers let the slowest
drive on the cable determine the maximum speed at which the other device can
operate. Modern hard drives have
transfer rates several times faster than those of CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives, so
you can hurt hard drive performance by sharing the IDE cable with a CD-ROM
drive.
**** But remember the article we included in the handout dated 20020220 --
“It looks like both your source and
your destination drive for the “on the fly” copy process are connected to the
same IDE bus. We would strongly recommend
to connect your source and the destination drive to
different IDE busses. An IDE bus cannot
handle interleaved read and write commands.
This will reduce the data transfer rate during “on the fly” copies and
may therefore cause a buffer under run error”.
It is suggested that you add your CD writer as the SLAVE on the PRIMARY
buss after the hard drive.
****
Health Hoaxes
Because
people are spreading false rumors about health-related subjects with such great
ease via email, use this site to check on your health related email to see if
it is a hoax before forwarding it on to someone else.
This
web page is for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and now has a
page devoted to Health Related Hoaxes and Rumors. The web address is
and click on the Hoaxes and Rumors
link under the Highlighted Resources heading in the left margin.
Changing the File Association
You
double-click on a file and it can’t find the program associated with it – or
you would like to change which program is associated with it – try this…..
In
Windows Me and Windows XP – from the START menu, choose SEARCH. Type in *.JPG
or *.GIF or whatever extension
you wish to change the file association of.
When files of this type have been located, right click on one of them
and choose OPEN WITH from the menu. Now
click on CHOOSE PROGRAM. This will list
all executable programs found in the Windows Registry. It helps to know which program(s) would open
the type of file that you are working with.
Highlight the program – put a check mark in the ALWAYS USE THIS PROGRAM
TO OPEN THESE FILES box and click OK.