FAQS! FACTS! FAX! 100 (12/03/98)

WANDERING START

My wife and I have a brand new, six-week old Pentium PC with Windows 95 installed. When new the Start button was in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. It later moved to the other side.  No one can explain to me how it got there, have you any ideas? It is doing no harm there so I am not asking how to restore it to its original location.

Len Thorogood

A

It’s unlikely the Start button and Taskbar moved of its own accord.  It can be positioned on any one of the four sides of the screen, simply by moving the mouse pointer onto a vacant part of the Taskbar, clicking and holding, then dragging it to where you want it to go. It’s quite easy to do it unintentionally, which is probably what happened in your case. One way to prevent it reoccurring, and free up some screen space is to make the Start button and Taskbar disappear, until they’re needed. You can enable this option by clicking on Settings, on the Start menu, select Taskbar, and check the Auto Hide box. The Start button will then only appear when the mouse pointer moves to the part of the screen where it has been placed.

CARD OR PORT?

I am thinking of buying a scanner and have noticed in the various magazines that some scanners have a choice of either a SCSI interface or a connection direct to the parallel port. The SCSI models are all more expensive than their parallel port counterparts.  Does this mean that they give better quality, or is it because they need an interface card, that costs extra?  Also, how easy or difficult is it to fit the interface card for the average computer user?

Jeff Lang

A

Scanners that use SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface or ‘scuzzy’) cards generally work faster than models that use the PC’s parallel port or printer socket. However, improved software and scanner design means that the speed differences are becoming less significant, especially on mid-market models costing between £150 to £300. Generally speaking there’s little difference between the two types when it comes to output quality. Clearly scanners that use a parallel port connection are easier to install, however, because the port is shared with the printer, you can’t print and scan at the same time.

Fitting a SCSI card is a fairly straightforward business. Assuming you can tell one end of a screwdriver from the other, and can follow some simple instructions it should only take you around ten minutes. The only pre-requisites are a reasonably fast Pentium or Pentium class PC with Windows 95 and a spare ISA slot on the motherboard. Scanning even simple images or documents takes forever on older, slower (pre-Pentium) PCs and configuring SCSI cards with other operating systems, like Windows 3.1 can be a nightmare.

FREEZING HOT…

I have a Windows 95 PC, if left switched on for a long period of time it has a habit of going into 'freeze frame'. This will generally stop me from opening, closing or continuing with any action. Sometimes pressing Ctrl, Alt + Delete will restore it to normal operation.  If that has no effect then I have no alternative but to switch the power off. I have asked one or two experts for help, but to no avail. Perhaps its time to show it the lump hammer.

Peter Keeney

A

There are a number of possible causes but before you get out the hammer, check the CPU cooling fan. If the main processor chip overheats it can produce the kind of symptoms you describe. Have you increased the size of your PC’s RAM recently? Mis-matched memory chips can also result in this kind of unusual behaviour. Otherwise you will just have to look for clues to isolate the problem. Does it only happen when you are using one particular application? Maybe it’s a combination of keystrokes, or an action, such as loading or saving a file?

PC PHOBIA

At present I own a Macintosh LCIII which is fairly basic and in need of more memory. I used Macs at college and thought they were more user-friendly, however I have recently got a job using PCs and am gradually getting to know them. I would like to either upgrade my existing Mac, buy a new Mac, or a PC. I have a budget of about £1500 and would like some advice on which option to take. I find PCs a little bit intimidating, as I'm unsure of what to do should they go wrong and how to set them up after buying one. Are Macs better as they are sold 'ready to use straight from the box'?

Sharon McDermott

A

It’s a difficult decision but consider this. The price of Macs and Mac clones have come down a lot lately but you still get more bangs for your bucks with a PC. The latest Super-fast Pentium II multimedia systems with 32Mb RAM, 3 gigabyte hard disc drives plus more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at, now sell for less than £1000. There’s a much bigger choice of PC software and peripherals; it also tends to be cheaper and more widely distributed. Windows 95 is pre-installed on virtually all new PCs, so you don’t need to worry about setting it up, not that it’s particularly difficult. PCs can go wrong, (even Macs have been known to fail occasionally), but PCs are usually easier and cheaper to fix.  Macs are truly wonderful too  – before aggrieved Apple fans write in – and Windows 95 is not as slick or stable as Mac operating systems but like it or not PCs and Windows 95 is far and away the most popular platform for home and business users. Mass marketing brings down prices, drives up performance and fuels innovation, in a volatile and fast-moving technology like computing it usually pays to go with the flow