What You Need to Know about All Things PC
Volume 4 Number 20Click here to return to the back issues page.Click here to return to the main newsletter page.
The Naked PC - http://www.TheNakedPC.com What You Need to Know about All Things PC Publisher: Lee Hudspeth and T.J. Lee Editor in Chief: Dan Butler Contributing Editor: Al Gordon This issue is for Thursday, October 4, 2001 - Vol. 4 No. 20 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Table of Contents ** 01. Letter from the Publisher ** 02. Computer Tips Compendium: Part 2 (by T.J. Lee) ** 03. Recycling PC Components and Paraphernalia - Part 1 (by Lee Hudspeth) ** 04. Pocket-Sized Software: Part 2 (by Al Gordon) ** 05. Applications: Here to There - Part 3 (by T.J. Lee) ** 06. Featured Product - USB Active Extension Cable by A-TEN ** 07. Featured Web Page - PowerQuest's Master Error List ** 08. Featured Drawing - Hot Days, Hot Tips ** 09. Newsworthy - a potpourri of current events and interesting stuff ** 01. Letter from the Publisher Welcome to October, everyone, which is the month of the Orionids meteor shower. This year's best night to observe should be October 21-22 with about 20 meteors per hour. There will be some activity from the 15th to the 29th. Just take a gander at the northeastern part of the constellation Orion. Here's how: http://comets.amsmeteors.org/meteors/showers/orionids.html We're tickled to bring you yet another issue of The Naked PC. This issue kicks off with Jim's coverage of our "Computer Tips Compendium" ebook, and later in the issue he finishes his multi- part coverage of PC software migration. Lee starts a new, green series on recycling all things PC. Al offers another in his ongoing series on Pocket PC software. Speaking of tips, here's one for you. If you are feeling like curling up with a good book, be sure to check out The Naked PC library. It contains a listing of all the books we've covered, along with an executive summary of each review, plus links for purchasing each title: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/tnpcbooks.html CONGRATULATIONS to C.T. in California and Joseph B. in New Jersey, the winners of our The Naked PC "Just Say No to Telemarketers" drawing. They have each won an Easy Hang Up anti- telemarketing device. The hot weather continues in California so check out this issue's "Hot Days, Hot Tips" drawing. It's an easy way to earn a chance at a free copy of our latest ebook "Computer Tips Compendium," so check out this issue's Featured Drawing. Reader support is what keeps The Naked PC free. To this end you can help us by passing a copy on to co-workers and friends (no spam please). We even make it easy to refer people to The Naked PC... check out our Refer page: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/refer/ So now you know. +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ "The Book That Should Have Come with Your Computer" "This book should come with every PC - it has become MY BIBLE." "I find information in this book that I can't find anywhere else." These are just a few of the comments we've received on this book. This book-on-a-CD-ROM is fully searchable! Written by the same guys that bring you this newsletter, T.J. Lee, Lee Hudspeth, and Dan Butler, tell you what every computer user needs to know. As Chris Pirillo at Lockergnome said, "It's amazing how much stuff you'll find on the care and feeding of your system in this book." If you use computers you need this book! Check it out! http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?tugpc2 +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ ** 02. Computer Tips Compendium: Part 2 (by T.J. Lee) (Blatant plug coming up, so don't say I didn't warn you!) We'd like to thank those of you who placed an early-bird order for our latest e-Book, "Computer Tips Compendium," and who thereby got the discount price of $19.95. We have ironed out all the kinks in our production process; the first pressing came back from the replicator in less than a week and we started shipping these CDs on Monday, October 1st. Be advised that mail is still moving slow here in the USA so be patient. For folks who may have missed the announcement in The Naked PC #4.19, our latest book-on-CD-ROM, "Computer Tips Compendium," is fully searchable and contains over 460 of our favorite and most useful computer tips. Tips on individual software programs like Word, Excel, Outlook, as well as programs from Symantec and PowerQuest. Internet tips on surfing, browsing, downloading, privacy, shopping safety, fraud, controlling displayed text size, transferring Favorites and bookmarks between computers, eliminating page backgrounds... the list just goes on and on! Tips on buying the right RAM, locating drivers, where to find hardware advice, customizing, setup options, you name it there's probably a tip for it in the "Computer Tips Compendium." This CD includes the following bonuses: -- Access to the RESTRICTED Tips Section of The Naked PC Web site. Here you'll find updates to URLs as well as new tips. -- The Official NakedPC Screen Saver. Pithy words of wisdom and cool sound effects keep your monitor safe from whatever screen savers are supposed to protect monitors from these days. -- A chapter on using Adobe Reader 5.0. You'll use this information on every PDF document you open from now on. -- Discount coupons good towards purchases of products from The Naked PC Company Store. All this on a CD for just $24.95 and we pay the postage on all books shipped within the USA. Check out the information on the "Computer Books Compendium" (including the table of contents which lists the hundreds of tips contained in the electronic book): http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?ctc You can reach T.J. Lee at: mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com ** 03. Recycling PC Components and Paraphernalia - Part 1 (by Lee Hudspeth) I am a recycling zealot. In this article, and others to follow, I hope to show you some good reasons for paying close attention to what you can recycle, and how easy and fun it can be to do something that's beneficial to this wonderful yet delicate planet's ecosystem. I'm convinced that this behavior really "scales up." For example, if just one more person shifts from tossing all their used floppies or CDs in the trashcan to keeping them in a box under the desk and recycling them properly, well then, that's real and measurable progress. I wasn't always so zealous about recycling. Sure, I would dutifully put material into our local disposal service's recycling bin, standard stuff like glass, plastic, and paper. Then one day I was driving around downtown Hermosa Beach and spied a large banner posted up above the street. The banner promoted an upcoming Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) drop-off event in my neighborhood, so I called the listed phone number and quickly learned how many other types of items I could be recycling: expired or unused medicines, batteries, household cleaners, art supplies, electronics, and many others. It was a revelation to me how pervasive HHW is, and how easy it is to properly dispose of it. For a list of the types of materials considered to be household hazardous waste, along with detailed FAQs on each type of material, see the following page provided by the Morris County (New Jersey) Municipal Utilities Authority: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?lee1 But I'm getting ahead of myself, since this article's focus is on recyclable PC-related media: CDs, floppy diskettes, and other magnetic media. (I'll cover other PC-related recyclable items in subsequent issues.) For about a year I've been accumulating CDs--old CDs, outdated CDs, coasters, broken CDs, you name it--in a plastic box under my desk. I wanted to properly recycle these along with some old floppy diskettes and magnetic tapes that have been sitting in the attic for a few years. Here's where I turned: GreenDisk, the makers of high quality recycled diskettes and CD-R disks. Not only does the firm manufacture recycled media products, it offers a recycling program for these media. Courtesy of GreenDisk's Web site, here are some interesting facts--some are SHOCKING--about what happens to failed and surplus diskettes. We throw away 3-4 million diskettes daily, which equates to 1 BILLION per year. Ouch. When sitting in a landfill, a diskette takes about 450 years to decompose, and while doing so threatens to leach oxides into the local water table. (I calculate 450 years at between six and seven generations. What a heartbreaking gift we bequeath to our children, grandchildren, and so on if we don't arrest this squandering of resources.) Here's how GreenDisk's recycling program works for end users and small companies. (Large corporations also trust their tons of expired and/or obsolete software to GreenDisk for recycling, including Microsoft, Boeing, the U.S. State Department, and the FAA.) You simply ship 3.5" diskettes (they don't handle 5.25" diskettes), magnetic tapes, CDs, and videotapes to their recycling facility in Columbia, Missouri, paying a minimum $5.00 fee for up to 50 pounds and $0.10/pound over 50 pounds. That's an extremely reasonable fee for the value of this service to our economy and ecology. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?lee2 I personally just sent them a six pound shipment. I encourage you to consider doing the same with your used media. Thank you. According to GreenDisk's Web site, "The media is magnetically erased, fully inspected and evaluated. The disks and CDs are then disassembled and the plastic and metal components are recycled to make new disks and other items. The tapes are de-labeled, cleaned, packaged and resold." As of GreenDisk's second anniversary, it reports it has recycled nearly 20 million pounds of software materials and over 20 million diskettes. Furthermore, GreenDisk says it recycles or reuses over 99.5% of the materials it receives for recycling. According to David Beschen, President, "We degauss magnetic media at a level that's four times stronger than the Department of Defense requirement. Our primary concern is protection of corporate and individual intellectual property." Upon receipt of your shipment, an authorized GreenDisk staff member signs a Certificate of Destruction that states, "This certifies that all materials received by GreenDisk Services on [date] have been recycled in an environmentally sound and secure manner and the intellectual property contained on the disks, CDs or tapes has been destroyed." Beschen says, "We in the U.S. have been conscientious about how we recycle paper and similar products. At GreenDisk we think it's important to make it 'free and easy' for folks to recycle computer media too. It's also important to have recyclers deliver something back, as we do with our existing recycled diskette and CD-R disk products." For more details about GreenDisk, see my supplemental page: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?lee3 To find out where you can buy GreenDisk's recycled CD-R disks and floppy diskettes: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?lee4 If you have suggestions, anecdotes, or comments about the proper recycling of PC paraphernalia, I'd like to hear from you. You can reach Lee Hudspeth at: mailto:leehudspeth@TheNakedPC.com +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ Halloween! Christmas! Don't WAIT until the last minute! The BRIGHTEST flashlights for their size in the WORLD make great Halloween props and Christmas presents! Great for giving to friends, family, employees... give the gift of light that fits in any purse or pocket, a Micro-Light is small enough to clip to your key chain. With a Micro-Light you will never be caught in the dark! 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One of the key features of handhelds has always been transferring files from one unit to another via infrared "beaming." Then Conduits developed Peacemaker. You can beam to a Palm from your Pocket PC and also receive data back. Files, notes, contacts, calendar items, all neatly reconfigured to the demands of the respective units. For example, because Pocket Outlook contacts have more fields than Palm Address book listings, Peacemaker automatically trims the Outlook data to fit into the Palm. So now if you have a Pocket PC you can share an intimate beaming moment with your Palm counterparts. -- HandyZIP from CNetX, $19.95. The product is exactly what it sounds like: it will create or open compressed archive files in the standard zip format. This allows you to move a zip archive over to your Pocket PC as is, and open it on the handheld as needed. Compressing files in a zip is particularly valuable for conserving space on your handheld's precious built-in RAM. The interface is easy to use, very much the Pocket PC equivalent of the ubiquitous WinZip, and zip files will be associated with the program in Pocket PC's File Explorer. Other key items for the Pocket PC user's shopping list included: -- Flash Format 2.0, $14.95, also from CNetX, which allows you to check and format and verify all ATA compliant storage cards, including PCMCIA memory cards, Compact Flash Cards, Multimedia Cards, and MicroDrives. It will provide detailed storage and file statistics (including FAT Type, slack space, heads, cylinders, sectors, clusters, etc.), verify card integrity, and detect and repair allocation errors. A key feature is its ability to format cards in FAT32 (default in Pocket PC is FAT16) with its smaller cluster size. Since Pocket PCs inherently deal in small-sized files, slack space can mount up; especially, as a CNetX spokesman reminded me, given the availability of large-capacity storage cards and disk drives. Flash Format also can create a backup FAT and create an AutoRun capability to provide that a specific file will run when you insert a particular card (e.g., start up a graphics viewer on a card that has picture files). -- Code City's CityTime, $14.95. I first came across this application when it was bundled into Handspring Visors. It tracks time in four cities besides your own, gives sunrises and sunsets, moon phases, travel distances, computes time differentials, and generally makes life easier for people whose work and friendships cross time zones and international datelines. One of the key features of CityTime is that its interface has a world map with areas of day and night marked. Tap on a location, and the time for that place pops up. It was an interesting feature in black and white, and looks exceptionally cool in color. CityTime's strength is that it brings information to you in a way that takes advantage of the handheld platform. -- The Applian Super Incredible Bundle, $49.85, is a good buy for Pocket PC users, as the price gets you its PicturePerfect 5.1 graphics software and CoolCalc enhanced calculator, which are $19.95 each by themselves. The bundle adds in a reminder, "Virtual Wallet" (it stores drivers license, credit card, or bank account numbers and like personal information with password protection), a dialer program that uses the PDA's speaker to generate dialing tones, a file encryption program, and a few games. CoolCalc provides a wide range of advanced calculator functions-- financial, scientific, loans, currency converter, tip calculator, metric converter, date and time calculators. A nice convenience. Picture Perfect allows you to sensibly organize photos on your Pocket PC. You build collections of images as slide shows to display on the handheld. The software allows you to set transition effects, timings between slides, "smart" full-screen views (automatically adjusting for portrait or landscape orientation), sound effects, and text notes. It also performs lossless JPEG transformations, such as rotation or flipping, on an image. -- Timekeeper, $9.95, another offering from Conduit, is a nicely designed stopwatch program with "skins" to optimize it for purposes ranging from timing a race to cooking an egg. -- Pocket PCs ship with a handheld applet for--surprise!-- Microsoft Money. Pocket Quicken exists only in the Palm universe. However, Keep Track from Ilium Software is a well-featured application to, ahem, keep track of your trips to the ATM, credit card purchases, and the like. It will import and export to the .qif format, which both Quicken and Money use for data exchange. The interface makes use of programmable buttons for common transactions and for inputting numbers, to achieve the all- important goal of minimizing the number of stylus strokes you must make. It's $19.95, plus $10 for the Desktop Keep Track module to synchronize, print and back up your transactions. -- Primer from Ansyr Technology, $79.95, is a heavy duty Adobe Acrobat .pdf file reader for the Pocket PC. And I do mean .pdf reader--it opens and displays actual Acrobat files in their original form, as opposed to the number of programs on the Palm platform that convert the .pdf into a simplified format. This is not for the casual user looking to skim product brochures. Primer is intended for business users who want to make key documents-- instruction manuals, handbooks, organizational guides, and the like--on Pocket PCs. Company spokespeople say they see training and reference documents as a key market, as this will allow workers to check through key materials in the field. -- And let's not forget to have a little fun: Microsoft Entertainment PocketPak brings the mission-critical applications of Freecell, Blackjack, Chess, Cinco, Hearts, Minesweeper, Reversi, Sink The Ships, Space Defense, and Taipei to the Pocket PC. The bundle is $29.95, or buy individual games for $9.95 each. Click here to read Part 1 of this article series: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?al1 Click here to see all of my supplemental material related to this article, including links for all the aforementioned products: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?al2 You can reach Al Gordon at: mailto:al@TheNakedPC.com +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ STOP TELEMARKETERS COLD! Easy Hang Up is the ultimate Anti-Telemarketer Device! Don't let your dinner get cold while you try to stop some telemarketer's sales pitch long enough to say NO! Just press the button on the Easy Hang Up and let this marvelous device tell the telemarketer that your phone number does not accept sales calls and put them on notice to remove your phone number from their call list. This small device plugs into your phone and when you get a sales call just press the button and hang up! It's that simple. Easy Hang Ups make GREAT holiday stocking stuffers! http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?ehu +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ ** 05. Applications: Here to There - Part 3 (by T.J. Lee) This is the last part in the continuing saga wherein I started out to migrate my working PC's programs and data to a bigger, faster system and my quest for a software solution to make this task easier than manually reinstalling all my applications. If you remember back in TNPC #4.17 I started this series of articles because a new product from the V Communications folks, who brought us System Commander, intrigued me. Called PC Upgrade Commander this software purports to migrate your data and applications, including the all important registry settings, from one computer to another even if the PCs involved are running different versions of Microsoft Windows. In this wrap up of the series I'll detail how the different software and brute force techniques finally worked out. I never did get Upgrade Commander to work. It repeatedly failed at exactly the same spot after first setting up communications between the two PCs (see TNPC #4.18 for the details). The tech support people at V Communications tried mightily to help me get it running but to no avail. One theory was that perhaps the fact that my source PC had two network cards (one for the local network and one for my DSL modem), the transfer software got confused and aborted the migration. Disabling the DSL modem network card didn't solve the problem and neither did trying the beta version of the software they sent me. Keep in mind that V Communications did not write this software, it's something they licensed from someone else so the tech support guys were definitely going uphill although they were nice and really did try to help. But let me say that I have heard from several TNPCers who have successfully used Upgrade Commander so I'm not saying it would not work for you, it just wouldn't work on my system. Sigh, $40 down the drain. But the story did not end there. After Part 1 of this series was published I heard from many TNPCers who recommended a program called PC Relocator from an outfit with the unlikely name of Alohabob. PC Relocator says it can help you migrate everything from one PC to another running the following combination of operating systems: From Windows 95 to Windows 95 From Windows 95 to Windows 98 From Windows 95 to Windows ME From Windows 98 to Windows 98 From Windows 98 to Windows ME From Windows ME to Windows ME Pricing is currently $39.95 for the electronic download only version or $49.95 for the shipped version. But do keep in mind that the license for PC Relocator states you get one successful relocation for your purchase price. This is a "buy it and use it only once" deal. PC Relocator worked as advertised. It didn't allow me to move from a source PC running Windows 98 to a target PC running Windows 2000 but I figured I could reconfigure the target PC to Windows 98, relocate everything, then upgrade it to Windows 2000. And it should have worked that way, too. Except that things never go the way they should. It seems that way back when I installed Windows 2000 in a separate partition on my working (source) computer. I had long since removed that Windows 2000 partition from that computer but as I learned there's removing and then there's really removing. The result was that while PC Relocator dutifully copied everything to the new (target) PC I was unable to upgrade the new machine's operating system to Windows 2000. The problem is that when you migrate from one PC to another PC (using PC Relocator, Upgrade Commander, or any other of the currently available migration programs) it relocates everything! Data, drivers, applications, every single file comes across. In my case the vestiges of that old Windows 2000 installation that were slipped into the Win98SE partition came across and I learned that you cannot upgrade a machine to Windows 2000 if the Windows 2000 installation routine even thinks Windows 2000 is now or ever was installed on the computer. Flat out won't do it. Fortunately, Lee Hudspeth wrote an article, "Multi-Booting: Field Notes on Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows 98", wherein there's great advice on removing, I mean really removing, Windows 2000 from a dual boot PC. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?jim1 So after scrubbing, deleting, and otherwise scraping off all remnants of Windows 2000 from my source PC I was able to use PC Relocator to migrate everything from my old PC to my new PC then upgrade it to Windows 2000. Whew! Was it worth it? Well, my overall feeling is the same as that which several TNPCers shared with me. Chief Joe, a long time TNPC reader and knowledgeable computer user, summed it up best, "Each machine migrated ran distinctively slower than the same machine with a clean install." The problem is that when you migrate using the current tools available you get an awful lot of extraneous baggage along with the stuff you actually want to transfer. You get all the flotsam and jetsam that has accumulated in your Registry and when you put it all together, performance suffers. And you cannot yet pick and choose which applications and files get migrated, it's pretty much all or nothing. My sad conclusion is that the technology is not yet advanced enough to automate program migration between computers. It is still best to keep your programs, updates, and patches and fixes, and when necessary reinstall them from scratch. You have no idea how much it pains me to say that but there's still a long way to go before migration technology can live up to its true potential. I've wiped my new computer once again and will do the migration the old fashioned way. You can reach T.J. Lee at: mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com ** 06. Featured Product - USB Active Extension Cable by A-TEN If you need a run of USB cable that's longer than 5 meters (16 feet), you don't have to buy a hub. Instead you can use an Active Extension Cable which is basically a hub in a cable. This approach gives you a maximum run of 25 meters (82 feet). An Active Extension Cable is a 5 meter cable with a built-in 1-port hub. It includes a chip that buffers the signals in accordance with USB specifications. You can daisy-chain four Active Extension Cables plus one 5 meter peripheral cable, yielding the maximum supported run of 25 meters. A-TEN's product no. UAE-16 is available at usbgear.com for $26.50 per unit. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?fprod ** 07. Featured Web Page - PowerQuest's Master Error List PowerQuest manufactures quality desktop and enterprise storage products that can truly enhance your productivity when working with your PC. We've been using and recommending PowerQuest products--like PartitionMagic, BootMagic, Drive Image, and DriveCopy--for years both here in The Naked PC and our books. Not many software development companies publish listings of their products' error codes. PowerQuest does, and it goes one better. Each error's Web page typically includes a description of the error, a step-by-step solution to the error, and details on which product/version/environment combination causes the error. Kudos, PowerQuest. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?fsite ** 08. Featured Drawing - "Hot Days, Hot Tips" School's in session, the calendar reads October, and mountains of Halloween candy are in every supermarket. Yet the mercury is till hovering around the 100-degree mark (Fahrenheit) here in California's Central Valley. So what better than hot computer tips on a hot day? For folks new to our e-zine, or who haven't entered one of our drawings yet, here's how it works. You go to a Web page on The Naked PC site, answer one survey question (something like "Would you like to see The Naked PC delivered weekly instead of every other week?"), and enter your email address. To encourage readers to participate in the survey, we have a drawing from the email addresses of those who participate in each survey and we give away something really cool. This time we're giving away two copies of our "Computer Tips Compendium" ebook that we sell in The Naked PC Store. Now, obviously we already have your email address or you wouldn't be reading this, but this drawing for prizes will only include those folks who answer this issue's question (entering a prior drawing doesn't count for this one). We'll only use the email addresses we collect for the purpose of notifying who won the prizes, nothing else. On October 10th we'll pick two entered names at random and give away a "Computer Tips Compendium" CD-ROM to each winner. How easy is that? http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?fdrawing ** 09. Newsworthy - a potpourri of current events and interesting stuff *-* The end of this year will see Microsoft pull the support plug on Windows 95, Windows NT 3.5, all versions of MS-DOS, as well as Windows 3.x products. June 30, 2003 will see life support, er technical support, cut for Windows 98/98SE and Windows NT 4.x. Microsoft knows that it can only keep the cash cow mooing if it get users to upgrade by buying new versions of their software and dropping support for old versions appears to be one of their strategies to keep you shelling out for the latest and greatest. For more information about Microsoft product lifecycles, visit the Microsoft Web site. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?news1 *-* A U.S. District court has ordered several thousand Web sites to be shut down in a decision against John Zuccarini. The FTC reports Zuccarini operated over 5,500 Web sites that employed the tactic of using common misspellings for domain names. Once entered, the sites spawn numerous pop-up ads, mainly for gambling and pornography. The sites also override the Back feature to not go back but instead generate even more pop-up ads. The FTC is seeking to have Zuccarini return the estimated $800,000 to $1 million he generated in advertising revenues using these diversionary domains. No stranger to litigation, Zuccarini has lost 53 of 63 suits filed against him in the last two years by trademark owners like celebrities and others. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?news2 *-* Sun has released the beta of version 6.0 of its free, cross- platform StarOffice office utility package. StarOffice is a free download (true for both its current version 5.2 and the beta v6.0), versus Microsoft Office XP Standard's street price of $424. This huge dollar savings has tempted plenty of folks to give StarOffice a spin. Furthermore, Sun has released the entire source code base for StarOffice. Version 6.0 is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2002. To download the beta of v6.0: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?news3 To read more about v5.2's features and specifications: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?news4 *-* This is an engaging, thought-provoking article written by Phillip Zimmermann, the author of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), regarding his feelings on the recent attacks on America and the possible use of PGP in planning the attacks. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?news5 *-* We're still tracking the HP/Compaq merger story. In an article by HP CEO Carly Fiorina entitled "Of Myths and Mergers," she works hard to dispel the focus of the press on the merger's PC market consolidation and cost-cutting angles. Lexical note for the discerning reader: Fiorina uses the term "market-unifying" no fewer than five times in this one article. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/420/tr.cgi?news6 Get more Newsworthy bits on The Naked PC Web site: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/newsworthy/ Have you come across something newsworthy? Drop us a line: mailto:hottips@TheNakedPC.com **PLEASE SUPPORT THE NAKED PC BY VISITING OUR ADVERTISERS** +++----------------------- classifieds -----------------------+++ Tweaki...for Power Users Designed for all Windows operating systems, Tweaki is your Swiss army knife of utilities. Implement security, lock down your Desktop, tweak Microsoft Office, optimize Windows--roughly 500 tweaks in all! Tweaki also comes with a built-in undo function that restores any tweaked setting the utility tracks, no matter how long ago you tweaked it! http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?tweaki +++-----------------------------------------------------------+++ **NEED INK? 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