The Computer Club Newsletter
May 2002
By Ron Uncapher
As I promised last month, the speaker at the May meeting of TVCUC, Doris
Prichard, Director of U of T’s Preston Medical Library, gave an excellent
presentation on finding medical information on the web. She described
sources from which to find any medical information ever printed and how to
determine the credibility of the source.
The speaker for the June 4th meeting also promises to bring a
wealth of information on hard drives. Gene Barlow represents two software companies, PowerQuest Corporation and AccessData
Corporation. These companies publish some excellent hard drive utilities.
PowerQuests’ industry leading PartitionMagic helps to organize and protect
your data while running multiple operating systems on the same computer.
AccessData publishes an award-winning suite of hard drive and computer
security products. Your hard drive contains a wealth of information about
you that you thought you deleted months ago. Not so. AccessData’s
SecureClean is a powerful tool designed to clean the drive of confidential
data. Gene’s presentation will focus on the following topics: Organizing
your Hard Drive; Managing your Operating System; Protecting your Hard Drive;
and Securing your Hard Drive. "Special User Group Prices" on many of these
products will be offered at the meeting and available for you to take home.
Gene will bring handouts and exciting door prizes as well. It should be a
super meeting. Bring a friend and don’t miss it!
If you are not a member, please sign up at the meeting. There are many
benefits of being a member, including SIGs described in a previous article,
"Helping Hands" for personal help with your problems, and much more. Fifteen
dollars gets an 18 month membership. Check out the club at our website,
www.TVCUC.org . And current members,
don’t forget to renew. We are renewing for 18 months rather than 12 months
to line up our dues collection with our fiscal year.
I had a question this past month about "zip" files. What is a "zip" file
and why would I care? "zip" refers to a computer process that compresses or
shrinks a file from its normal size to a somewhat smaller size. The size
reduction varies, depending on the content. Graphics files can be compressed
quite dramatically while text or program files may be reduced considerably
less. Why would you want to "zip" a file? The primary reason is that a
"zipped" file takes up less space on your computer. If you are running low
on hard drive storage, you might "zip" some of your seldom used files or
archived files to free up space on your hard drive. You might want to "zip"
a file or group of files and put them on removable storage media as backup.
Floppy disks have limited space, but will hold up to two or three times what
they would normally hold if the files are compressed by "zipping". When you
need the file, "unzip" or decompress it to its original usable format. Great
for backup.
Another reason you might compress a file is to send it to a friend over
the Internet. If the file is "zipped" it will be smaller, and thus take less
time to upload and download. Most programs you download off the Internet are
in a self extracting "zipped" format. By self extracting, I mean, the file
is in an executable format (.exe) that has the "unzip" program built in. For
example, you may download a 2 megabyte program, but when you execute it, it
installs to over 4 megabytes.
OK, you want to "zip" some files. How do you do it? There are several
utilities that "zip" and "unzip". WINZIP is a popular program. You can
purchase and download it off the web. One of the originals, is PKZIP. I like
ZIPFREE because it is free. These programs have more or less features. Most
will allow you to compress a single file, or a group of files into one
"zipped" file. They allow you to look at an index of files within the
"zipped" file and "unzip" one or all. These programs are all available on
the web.
If you have Windows ME you may have notice a folder with a zipper on it.
You can drag a file from anywhere on you desktop into the zipper folder and
it compresses into a "zipped" format. Open the folder and drag a file out to
your desktop (another folder) and it uncompresses unzips). Easy! You can
create a compressed folder if one does not exist. Go to MY DOCUMENTS, click
on FILE*NEW*COMPRESSED FOLDER. For more information on COMPRESSED FOLDERS,
open your HELP INDEX and type in "compressed folders".
The sites for finding the above ZIP utilities and much more information
on ZIP files are:
WINZIP www.winzip.com
PKZIP www.pkware.com
ZIPFREE www.pepsoft.com/zipfree/intro.html
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