What You Need to Know about All Things PC
Volume 4 Number 21Click 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 18, 2001 - Vol. 4 No. 21 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Table of Contents ** 01. Letter from the Publisher ** 02. Putting PGP to Use (by Dan Butler) ** 03. eXPeriencing Windows XP (by Al Gordon) ** 04. Recycling PC Components and Paraphernalia: Part 2 (by Lee Hudspeth) ** 05. Nigerian Letter Scam Is Alive and Well (by T.J. Lee) ** 06. The Naked PC Store Update (by Dan Butler) ** 07. Featured Product - ClutterBuster from Stomp, Inc. (by T.J. Lee) ** 08. Featured Web Page - Federal Standard Glossary of Telecommunications Terms ** 09. Featured Drawing - Halloween Monster Mash ** 10. Newsworthy - a potpourri of current events and interesting stuff ** 01. Letter from the Publisher This issue of The Naked PC is proudly brought to you by... the concept that it can be FUN to use your personal computer. We've been ringing that bell for over a decade in our various consulting practices, and for four solid years here in the pages of The Naked PC. If you want to quickly put your hands on our fun-filled musings about PCs and human productivity, there are two main places to go. First, you can visit our Web site where you'll find a wealth of articles and information from the pages of The Naked PC newsletter. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/index2.html Second, visit our estore where you can buy our ebooks, our productivity-enhancing software products, and software products from third parties whom we endorse and trust: http://www.TheNakedPCStore.com This issue launches with Dan's power-packed productivity pointers about using PGP to protect passwords and other sensitive data. Al's provides his insights into the almost-on-store-shelves operating system Windows XP. Lee continues his series on getting green with your techno-trash. Jim waves a red flag to warn you about an old scam that just won't quit and may have already found its way into your inbox. Dear TNPC readers, Dan is looking for copies of the DAK catalogs sent out in years gone by. If you have some laying around please contact him at: mailto:DanButler@TheNakedPC.com CONGRATULATIONS to the letter R, well, actually to Robin R. and John R., the winners of our The Naked PC "Hot Days, Hot Tips" drawing. They have each won a free copy of our latest ebook "Computer Tips Compendium." Be sure to check out this issue's Halloween Monster Mash drawing, it's a snap to enter! 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 -------------------------+++ Christmas Stocking Stuffer Alert! "The Book That Should Have Come with Your Computer" may not have come with your--or a friend's--computer, but you can do something about it. This book-on-a-CD-ROM fits nicely into Christmas stockings, and brings the warm glow of knowledge and power to any PC user. "This book should come with every PC - it has become MY BIBLE." Written by the same guys who 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. Putting PGP to Use (by Dan Butler) Many of you have installed PGP based on my recent series of articles. As promised, here is a simple way to use PGP to make your day-to-day life easier. Specifically, you can use the program to encrypt the username and passwords to various services on the Internet that you use. I realize that Internet Explorer will save your passwords for you but there are a couple of problems with that. First, anyone using your computer can access any private sites you visit--bank accounts, credit card sites, private information sites, etc. In addition do you really want to trust your private data to a Microsoft product? I sure don't. Instead store your information inside a simple text file that you keep PGP encrypted. This file can be right on your desktop. Unless the other person knows your private passphrase they aren't going to see your data. Another advantage to this approach is that you can keep notes along with your data. For example I might make a note of which sections of a private site are most useful to me. Then I'm not spending my time searching for that spot I saw during my last visit. If you want to try this approach it's easy (I'll assume you already have PGP installed on your system): - Create a new file in your favorite text editor that will become your private password file; Notepad works fine for this. - Type all the information you want to store in your private password file. - Save the file to your desktop with a name like "mystuff.txt". - With the file open click the PGP icon in your tray (looks like a small padlock). - Choose "Current Window / Encrypt" from the menu. - Pick your PGP Key from the list that pops up. - Click OK. Your document should now be incomprehensible to anyone looking at it, even you! So how do you look at it? With the document open click the PGP tray icon. Choose "Current Window / Decrypt and Verify". Enter your private passphrase in the window that pops up. Your secret data will now be visible to you. Just close the file when you are done and it's encrypted again. Quick and easy. This little technique lets you hide your secret data in plain sight. You needn't worry about someone discovering your passwords because without your private passphrase it's virtually impossible for anyone to access that data, including you! So make sure you remember your passphrase. Simple as that. I've put a page up that explains this process with a few pictures. Find it here: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?dan1 You can reach Dan Butler at: mailto:danbutler@TheNakedPC.com ** 03. eXPeriencing Windows XP (by Al Gordon) You just have got to love Microsoft. Windows XP should be playing to rave reviews and be a no-brainer recommendation for computer writers. But Redmond instead decided to choose this moment to adopt a rigid activation scheme and to build a huge number of its ".Net" (a/k/a "we want to own the Internet") features into the software. As a result, virtually every review of Windows XP is taking on the form, "The best version of Windows yet, BUT..." Including this article. XP is the most stable and user-friendly version of Windows yet. [Insert the wisecrack of your choice here.] The new interface is attractive and functional. It finally ends the divide between the Windows 9x-based consumer and NT-based corporate versions of Windows. Trust me; you are going to want it. And next time, I will get into some of the ways to successfully migrate to this new operating system. But first, we need to look at some of the reasons why you WON'T want it. When the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the lower court finding that Microsoft is a monopoly but rejected the ordered breakup of the company, the justices made a very sophisticated determination about the software business. The ruling said, in effect, that regulators need to distinguish between the times when Microsoft is a bull in a china shop and those when it is mainly an elephant in a flowerbed. The former--intentional abuse of market power-- has been the focus of government lawyers. But the latter--being so big that it can crush things even unintentionally--may be a more serious problem, especially since Redmond typically is blind to it. And that's the problem with XP. I am not all that bothered about the ways Microsoft XP tries to steer you to use Passport, Windows Messaging, MSN, etc., etc. Frankly, we should be used to this by now, and more important: you can shut this stuff off. A PC user who wants to use, say, AOL, and finds the task of manually installing it too onerous probably ought not to be using a PC in the first place. But "product activation" is something for which there is no legal workaround. To run the software, you must notify Microsoft by Internet or telephone that you have installed it. The process involves Microsoft obtaining information about your hardware so that the activated copy can be run ONLY on that PC. If you don't activate Windows, it won't run. Further, when Windows starts up, it scans your system and if the software detects "substantially different" hardware, re-activation is required or it won't run. The one-PC-per-operating-system limit has been Microsoft's policy for years. Go read your End User License Agreements (EULA) for previous versions of Windows. (You did stop during setup to read your EULA before clicking the "I agree button," didn't you?) However, until now, Microsoft had the good sense to not be ham- handed about it. Under the new system--first inflicted on users with Office XP-- the installation program takes a snapshot of your system configuration and then uses it to develop an activation code, which is obtained from Microsoft via the Internet or a phone call. Without the activation code in place, Windows XP won't run. In the face of searing criticism from the biggest Bigfoot in computer journalism, Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, and others Microsoft retreated slightly. It disclosed more details of the criteria: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?al1 The insanely complicated scheme looks at your display adapter, SCSI adapter, IDE adapter, network adapter MAC address, RAM amount range, processor type, processor serial number, hard drive device, hard drive volume serial number, and CD-ROM/CD-RW/DVD- ROM. You get to change six out of these 10 components without requiring re-activation. As a sop to power users, every 120 days the activation process is supposed to reset so you can change six more things. Unless you have a network card--now standard on most computers--in which case the change limit is three things. Unless it is a dockable laptop, for which there is a different set of rules. Unless you change your motherboard. Unless you install a new BIOS. Unless, Jupiter is aligned with Mars. This is the kind of overkill that happens when a company gets so big that it caught up in its own particular version of reality. And there is no one around to point out: "Hey, that's stupid." Redmond's stated goal is "to reduce a form of piracy known as 'casual copying' or 'softlifting.'" Or, in other words, taking one copy of Windows and using it on all the PCs in your house. Which pretty much everyone does to some extent. PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak got to the heart of the matter when he wrote, "Though Microsoft is right to try to protect its cash cows by ensuring people don't fill a neighborhood with copies of the software, you'd think that compensation for petty piracy would've been built into the pricing scheme." Exactly. The Windows XP activation scheme is a backdoor price increase on top of a direct price hike. The upgrade version of Windows XP Home is $100: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?al2 The upgrade version of Windows XP Professional is $200: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?al3 Window 98 upgrades have had street prices in the $90s--and no activation scheme. Windows 2000, which parallels XP Professional, had a street price at introduction in the range of $190, with a $70 rebate to users of Windows NT 4.0 (no rebate for Win9x upgraders). Plus, as another hidden price hike, XP Home edition does not support logging on to a network domain, as Win9x and Millennium did. So XP Professional, at twice the price, is mandated for networks with that kind of security. Naturally this is the security required when you build a network around Windows NT/2000/XP servers. The fact is that the retail price for XP is several times the price computer manufacturers and large corporate enterprise customers pay per copy (although they, too, have been hit with price increases). Microsoft has agreed to offer a minimal "family" discount--$10 off the retail pricing for up to four additional licenses. According to recently announced details, initially you will be able to get the discount only from your retailer or by calling the Microsoft's activation call center-- online fulfillment won't be available for 90 days or more. News bulletin for Redmond: the tech industry is in a recession. Econ 101 says that if demand is down, you probably ought to be lowering prices instead of raising them if your goal is to jump- start sales. When it was conceived, activation might have had some vague strategic value to counterbalance the mammoth ill-will it is generating. That was then, this is now. Right now it is in Microsoft's own interest to get XP past antitrust scrutiny and on as many PCs as possible. Ten bucks is pathetic. Cut the price of XP, Microsoft. Do it now. You can reach Al Gordon at: mailto:al@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! Get a spooky Orange Micro-Light, just the thing for Halloween... or shine a Red, a White, and a Blue light! 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Note that in this and subsequent articles when I say "recyclable PC" I mean "a PC you don't want any more." Any PC, even your latest hotrod PC, is a candidate for recycling. If the PC you want to recycle is fully functional then consider these options: * keep it for a while * sell it * donate it to a charitable organization * recycle (dispose of; scrap) it in an environmentally appropriate way In any of the above cases--except if you continue using it, say, as a telecommunications server--you should completely sanitize its hard disk (more on this in a moment). Optionally you may want to go the extra mile and render the drive MS-DOS bootable after sanitizing it, as a courtesy to whomever the recipient may be. Even in a "keeping it for a while in storage" scenario, sanitize the drive since you might forget about it while it's in storage. When you stumble across it years later and it doesn't boot up due to some lack-of-use hardware failure, you won't have any worries about proprietary data sitting exposed--but not easily erasable-- on the belly-up PC's drive. While it's true that you can scrap a fully functional, obsolete PC, I encourage you to do try and keep it in service if at all possible. This way someone continues to extract value from it as an operating device, not just scrap metal or spare parts, and this minimizes inefficient, premature recycling. If the PC is not fully functional then you'll need to make a judgment call. If the problems aren't too severe, you may be able to repair the PC yourself for just a few dollars. Even with severe problems, there may be a market for it in the used component channel. If you're fortunate to have a PC donation/recycling organization nearby, contact them and see if they accept dysfunctional PCs. Here's how to sanitize a whole, recyclable PC. Folks, always sanitize a PC before you sell it or give it to someone else, even if you're giving it to a scrap heap! Boot into Windows and manually clear the Recycle Bin, clear your browser caches, delete proprietary data, delete password files, uninstall programs, delete Registry keys containing sensitive or confidential information, and so on. Then run a Windows-based tool like Norton Utilities WipeInfo. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?lee1 Note that if you're working with a hard drive that is beginning to fail, since a deep government-level wipe operation may tax it, I recommend you take the precaution of first manually deleting everything you can so at least you get that far in the event the drive crashes during the wipe. Although I have not yet personally evaluated any of these file/disk sanitizing tools, there are plenty of them. Go up to ZDNet Downloads and search on "erase". http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?lee2 These tools that popped up repeatedly during my Internet searches: * DiskSanitizer, FormatSecure 2001, and Eraser 2000 http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?lee3 * Disk Amnesia http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?lee4 * Zdelete http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?lee5 Alternately--and ideally for an older Windows 9x (or prior, including even MS-DOS-only) system--you have a copy of the now defunct but extremely cool Norton Utilities MS-DOS tool WIPEDISK. There's also a version called WIPEINFO that supports a "Wipe entire drive" option.) I have kept copies of my Norton Utilities v4.5 diskettes around for years, with the masters safely tucked away; in fact, these tools' timestamps date back to 1989! This tool scrubs the entire drive to U.S. Department of Defense specifications, and eradicates the system areas, so when you're done you'll have to format the drive for it to be usable again. That's exactly how well scrubbed you want your hard drive to be before it leaves your possession. You don't have to do any manual deletion from within Windows with this tool, just run it from "Restart in MS-DOS mode." If you want to sell a whole, recyclable PC, you can always try your local newspaper and other printed media channels. Here is a list of Top10Links' current top ten (by popular vote) computer auction Web sites: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?lee6 Here's a listing of computer scrap companies in the U.S. (list maintained by "Share the Technology," a nonprofit corporation). You may be able to locate other similar firms in your region either through the yellow pages or by searching the Internet. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?lee7 In future articles I'll provide resources for donating and recycling (disposing of; scrapping) a whole PC. I welcome your comments on recycling techno-trash. You can reach Lee Hudspeth at: mailto:LeeHudspeth@TheNakedPC.com +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ PRIME for Office Utilities CD If you use Microsoft Office, and by that we mean Office 97, Office 2000, or Office XP, then you need to read this! From the Publishers of The Naked PC newsletter come the ultimate utility sets for Office. On one CD you get PRIME for Word, PRIME for Excel, and the amazingly useful PRIME DocLauncher for Office utilities. Hundreds of features! And now you get the utilities plus our ebook "How To Save Time with Office" that will show you how to use each and every utility to unlock the true potential of your Office applications. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/a/tr.cgi?pcgcd3 +++------------------------- sponsor -------------------------+++ ** 05. Nigerian Letter Scam Is Alive and Well (by T.J. Lee) I briefly mentioned the Nigerian Letter Scam back in TNPC #4.10. It's an ancient flimflam that dates back at least as far as the pigeon-drop or Ponzi scheme and predates the Internet by 100 years or more. I'm going to discuss it again because lately I've been seeing one or more of these Nigerian Letters coming into my inbox as spam so the letter seems to be making a strong comeback. In pre-Internet days, a likely mark (read: sucker) would receive an elaborate and very official looking document that tells the sad tale of a vast fortune that will be lost forever (to some dark power or mindless bureaucracy) unless you, a person recommended to be of great moral character, can help by simply providing a bank account that can be used to transfer the money from the country where it is (this could be anywhere on the globe) to your country (usually the USA) which will provide a safe haven for it. Once transferred it will be taken off your hands and for your help in this matter you will receive a small to medium percentage of the total fortune which usually translates to a million or more for you. What could be simpler? Well, of course, this sounds too good to be true, because it isn't true. It's a scam and if you receive a Nigerian Letter you are the scam's intended victim. With the advent of the Internet the Nigerian Letter scam has gone into mass production. Sent as spam, hundreds of thousands of these letters are sent out as emails. What's distressing is that if they never worked we wouldn't be seeing so many of them floating around the Internet. What does a Nigerian Letter look like? Well, first off it usually does not mention Nigeria at all (although I did receive two lately that did). Usually the country where the funds are presently awaiting liberation is one that seems plausible given the political situation in some remote but rich part of the world. The only thing you can always expect is that a Nigerian Letter involves a mind-boggling amount of money and an offshore bank transfer. And that you hardly have to lift a finger to pocket a percentage. How you get skinned differs from scam to scam but rest assured, at some point you'll have to come up with some hard currency to protect your fee, or give some bad guy the keys to your bank account for wire deposits that may turn out to be withdrawals. To give you an idea of what these scams are all about (and so better resist their seductive lure) I've put some typical samples of Nigerian Letters I've come across lately on the Jim Page on The Naked PC Web site. You'll get a hoot out of the poor spellings, grammar, and interesting formatting used in these things. Take a look and remember, as Dire Straits said, it's only in rock and roll that you get money for nothin'. Oh, and if you ever do come across a legitimate business deal involving millions upon millions of dollars, it probably won't be with someone who has a free Yahoo! email account, as was the case with all of these sample letters. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?jim1 You can reach T.J. Lee at: mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com ** 06. The Naked PC Store Update (by Dan Butler) For folks who have written us asking about the Photon Micro-Light III, you'll see a full review soon. The first model I received was faulty and went through batteries as fast as I could replace them. A replacement arrived just before I took my family on a 10- day vacation. Full details coming soon. http://www.TheNakedPCStore.com You can reach Dan Butler at: mailto:danbutler@TheNakedPC.com ** 07. Featured Product - ClutterBuster from Stomp, Inc. (by T.J. Lee) I'm a visual guy, meaning that if I put something away, say in a drawer, it's a case of "out of sight, out of mind." So I tend to have files, printouts, and project work laid out all over my desk and any other flat surface in my office. This means that CDs, my pen, pencil, paperclips, stamps and the usual flotsam and jetsam that reside on most desktops is constantly disappearing under file folders and paperwork. If I had a dime for every time I've lost something that couldn't physically be further away from me than arm's reach I'd be able to take as many vacations as everyone else around here. Despite my disorganized physical desktop I was very skeptical when the folks at Stomp, Inc. wanted me to check out their "ClutterBuster" desktop organizer. The name alone put me off and I was even more dubious when they explained that it "attaches" to the side of my monitor with adhesive strips. But I looked at one and was fairly impressed with the modular design and the engineering that went into the thing that lets you configure it for attaching to either side of your monitor (or CPU for that matter, depending on which is more conveniently located for your needs). The ClutterBuster provides you with slots to store CD-ROMs (or DVDs) in their jewel cases, drawers to keep stamps, paperclips, staple remover, etc., bins on top to keep pencils, pens, or in my case a letter opener and a pair of scissors. It sounds hokey, I know, but it works surprisingly well. I've had the unit on my monitor for over a month now and I actually weighed it down with lead fishing weights to see if the adhesive would really adhere. After much use and abuse I can say it has not budged at all from the original secured position. The modular design I spoke of means you can have more drawers or more CD slots depending on what you need the most. The ClutterBuster comes with four drawers and two CD bins but to use both bins you have to remove all the drawers. It's nice to have the CDs I'm currently working with handy and I've even started using the pencil/pen slots on the side to keep track of my writing instruments. The ClutterBuster is available directly from Stomp, Inc. and retails for $24.95. That struck me as being a bit pricey but it is very well made and engineered. You can check out a picture of the ClutterBuster on the supplemental page below: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?jim2 To purchase a ClutterBuster stop by the Stomp, Inc. site here: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?fprod You can reach T.J. Lee at: mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com ** 08. Featured Web Page - Federal Standard Glossary of Telecommunications Terms Whether you need to know what AWGN stands for (additive white gaussian noise, a/k/a white noise) or what zero-bit insertion means, this site can fill the bill. What you're looking at here is the hypertext version of the "Federal Standard 1037C, Glossary of Telecommunication Terms, 1996." You can scan the glossary by letter (A-Z), use the search engine, the index (organized by well thought out categories), or study a list of abbreviations and acronyms. This is one of the most comprehensive glossaries we've run across on the Internet. Not only that, this Web page went to charm school; its date/time stamp says things like, "Good morning." Hi, WRU? http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?fsite ** 09. Featured Drawing - Halloween Monster Mash Welcome to our scary Halloween Monster Mash drawing! Well, maybe not very scary but Halloween is a big holiday at the Jim household. If you've never entered a TNPC drawing here's how it works. You go to a Web page on The Naked PC site, answer one survey question (something like "How much of your holiday shopping will be done online?"), 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 "The Naked PC Volumes 1-3 Back Issues" CD 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 survey 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 24th we'll pick two entered names at random and give away a "Back Issues" CD-ROM to each winner. How easy is that? http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?fdrawing ** 10. Newsworthy - a potpourri of current events and interesting stuff *-* The beta release of the beta (free) StarOffice 6 office productivity suite has reportedly been downloaded over 200,000 times in the first week following availability. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?news1 *-* According to Paul Thurrott, Microsoft quietly launched Hotmail Plus. The Plus version is a subscription version of the "free" Web-based email service that gives subscribers 10 megabytes of email storage space for $12.95 per year. This is more evidence of the shift "from free to fee" thinking on the Internet. http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?news2 *-* Bill Machrone at PC Magazine has this to say about Windows XP Home edition, "Windows XP Home is essentially a downgrade from Windows 2000, gussied up with pretty icons and trimmed out with multimedia features that were mostly present in Windows Me. It is not a viable choice for most professional or laptop users. Though Windows XP's networking capabilities are the best yet, Windows XP Home Edition is deliberately crippled. It can't log on to Windows 2000 domains, which means that you probably can't use it at work- -and may not be allowed to, since it can compromise the security of corporate networks." http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/421/tr.cgi?news3 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! 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Also, although we work hard to provide you with accurate Internet links in The Naked PC, we are not responsible for Internet links herein that represent sites owned and operated by third parties. We are not responsible for the content, accuracy, performance, or availability of any such third-party sites. REDISTRIBUTION POLICY We encourage you to forward this newsletter to your friends, associates, and colleagues for their review and enjoyment. However, please do so only by sending it in full, thereby keeping the copyright and subscription information intact. We do request that, once they've reviewed an issue or two, they subscribe independently rather than continue to receive issues from you. This helps The Naked PC grow and prosper, thereby funding its continued publication. Also, if you wish to post this newsletter to a newsgroup or electronic discussion group, you may do so if you preserve the copyright and subscription information. Thanks. SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES To subscribe or unsubscribe, surf on over to: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/subscribe.html To make comments or suggestions, surf on over to: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/tnpfeedback.html or send email directly to: mailto:tnpc@TheNakedPC.com WEB BULLETIN BOARD Check out our 24x7 Web bulletin board. If you've got a technical question about PC issues, or suggestions of your own, this is the place to hang out: http://www.PRIMEConsulting.com/annoyanceboard/ ADVERTISING To advertise in The Naked PC go to: http://www.TheNakedPC.com/tnpcadvertising.html Mail services provided by Blue Horizon Enterprises, one of the very few "Mom and Pop" operations left on the Web: http://www.bhorizon.com Copyright (c) 2001, PRIME Consulting Group, Inc. and Dan Butler. All Rights Reserved. The Naked PC is a trademark of PRIME Consulting Group, Inc. ISSN: 1522-4422 TNPC Hot Tips:
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