 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
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It is important that you complete the Member Survey that we published in the
September issue.
If you haven't done so, please complete it online at
http://www.melbpc.org.au/surveys/. About 800 members have done so as I write this in early October. Last
year we had over 1200 responses and we'd like to see a similar response this year.
Windows and Me New PC
I had been waiting to receive a review copy of Windows Millennium Edition, otherwise known as Windows Me.
Reports suggest that it has not been taken up as well as did Windows 98 and Windows 95 before it.
The family PC was an old Cyrix P150 with 32 MB RAM and, for reasons I can't understand, the family kept
complaining that it was too slow - it was such a screamer back in 1996... When I took it for an upgrade, I
was told that it could not accommodate the new style motherboards, so I thought, "What the hell" and ordered
a brand new, 733 MHz Pentium III with 128 MB RAM, 32 MB 3-D video card, DVD, 15 GB hard disk and so on.
Windows Me was just days away from release, so I ordered it with the machine. Now the editorial Celeron 333
seems slow in comparison. Isn't that always the way?
I haven't really explored Windows Me deeply but it feels familiar and yet new. One of the alarming comments I
read about this operating system was about some bloke who returned his copy of Windows Me because it did not
have DOS and he needed to run Unix. (What was he doing with Windows, anyway?)
I ran to the other room and checked. The MS-DOS Prompt is still there. It works. I can type "DIR". Vern
Buerg's List still works. (Newbies who never used MS-DOS can ignore those remarks.) That's all the DOS I
need.
I specified a DVD drive for the new machine. DVD can mean Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc. The
former is more accurate because one can buy music-only DVDs and some of the industrial catalogues have
outgrown CD-ROMs and now come on DVDs. My drive is a Pioneer 105S. I had been following the newsgroup aus.dvd
for some time and had learnt that there is much more to know about DVD movies than their phenomenal video
quality. Yes, you will never go back to a video-taped movie once you have seen a DVD version of it. When I
observe the participants in aus.dvd, I am amazed at the number of movies they discuss, many of which I have
not heard of.
A part of the reason for that is some of the movies have not been released in Australia, at least not on
video or DVD. So the enthusiasts order from the United States or Canada, although the falling Dollar must
make that a painful exercise. Now here is the catch.
Just as the commercial told us, "Oils ain't oils", the same goes for DVDs. Having learnt their lesson from
the illegal copying of tapes and CD-ROMs, the powers-that-be decided to carve up the world into "Regions" and
to sell only discs and players that would only work in your region. The US is in Region 1 and we are in
Region 4. As I go to R1 frequently, I have bought the occasional NTSC video tape and now I will buy the odd
R1 DVD, such as the one I bought recently.
The other tidbit I picked up is that DVD drives allow you to change the
Region only five times and the last change is permanent. We had rented a R4 disc from the video library and
then we played the R1 disc. I did not see any ominous warning about having used up one change, so I thought I
had somehow obtained one of the early drives that did not know anything about regions. Wrong! Then I obtained
a program called DriveInfo, which told me that I had used up one change and I had four more.
Back to aus.dvd, where I heard about a wily Hungarian named Istvÿn Fekete whose Web site contains a
stern letter from Pioneer lawyers telling him not to distribute his programs for making Pioneer DVDs
"region-free". What a naughty thing to do! His reply to them is also posted there. I have it on extremely
good authority that his program works (and also voids your warranty, not to mention killing your drive should
you have a power outage during the procedure.)
I also learnt about table-top DVD players from obscure companies that are region-free out of the box (while
most other brands can be "fixed" for a fee), and omit Macrovision, which makes it hard to copy a DVD to tape,
but I'm not in a hurry to get one of those. One needs a decent home theatre system with a wide-screen TV,
which can cost as much as a small car and the wife is moaning again about her 10-year-old Magna. My family
comes before toys, so toys can wait.
Reprinted from the November 2000 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
