Wisconsin State Journal, April 10, 1998

Byline: Dave Becker

© 1998 Madison Newspapers, Inc.

IT'S A MAD, MAD WORLD INSIDE YOUR COMPUTER

Dear Dr. Click: I have a friend's computer that I installed a sound card and a CD-ROM drive into, but he doesn't have the computer manual. I had to use the drive that the 5 1/4 -inch floppy drive was in. Now when the computer boots up, an can't error reads that it find drive B booting and it stops up key. until you press the F1 How do a I get rid of this? It's Flex computer, 386DX/33, running Windows 3.11. The CD-ROM drive letter is D, and it works OK.

(Thanks to Anlex Computer Consulting for help with this question.)

Dear Friend: Think of your computer as one of those big, dysfunctional families in a Eugene O'Neill play. Everyone lives under the same roof and they all talk a lot, but nobody actually communicates. 
Your computer has a bunch of related systems residing in the same box, but none of them does a great job of talking to each other. In your case, the Windows operating system figured out you had a new CD-ROM drive and dealt with it. But the more basic CMOS system, a little chunk of memory on your motherboard that records what you've got, probably doesn't know a thing about it. The next time your computer boots up, look for a message on the order of ``Press DEL to enter setup'' right after you switch the power on and before Windows starts. Do whatever the message says, and you'll get a menu of settings you can change. Find the one for your B drive and switch it to ``none.'' And be careful, because if you go around whacking buttons at random in CMOS, your computer may not start up at all. If that doesn't do it, your problem may be on the motherboard, the main circuit board that holds everything together. Especially on older systems like yours, you sometimes have to reset jumpers -- little wire posts covered by plastic-coated connectors -- to adjust for different hardware combinations. Without the manual, you'll have a tough time at best figuring out which jumpers to change.

Dear Dr. Click: I have a Power Mac 760 0/1 32. In all text applications, including E-mail, I'll be typing along and suddenly the text that I'm typing has jumped up several lines.
It's a great nuisance, because I have to keep checking the screen to see if the text is going along the way it should. Do you think something is wrong with my keyboard (pretty old) or my mouse (not so old)?

Dear Jumpy: Our local Apple experts at MacGalaxy say your keyboard suspicions are well-founded. The computer is probably getting extra commands from the squirrelly keyboard that cause the cursor to jump round.
Ask one of those helpful tech buddies all Mac users seem to have if you can borrow his keyboard, and see if the problem goes away.

More for Country
We also got some feedback regarding a previous question from a Pardeeville-area resident who was finding it too expensive to hook up to America Online.
We just assumed he had already checked out the possibility of finding a local Internet service provider, but maybe we assumed too much. If Portage is a local call, the city has a fine local ISP in Palace.Net. For $20 a month, you get all the Web access and E-mail you want. Give them a call at 742-1601.
And if you want to retain your AOL account, you can switch to the company's ``bring your own access'' plan. For $10 a month, you get unlimited use of all AOL features, as long as you connect through another service. AOL can give you details.
Last but not least, we should have pointed out that you can keep connect time at a minimum by doing all your E-mail reading and writing off-line. Hook up to AOL, retrieve your messages and disconnect. Once you've read and written responses, reconnect to send your messages.
AOL even lets you set up ``flash sessions'' that will automatically send and retrieve messages at a specified time, so that your modem can do its business when phone rates are cheapest and connections are faster. Connect time shouldn't amount to more than a couple of minutes a day, which means you could even switch to one of AOL's cheaper metered-use plans.

More helpers
Finally, we should have pointed out by now that Dr. Click is by no means the only local source for free tech support.

The Madison PC Users Group has been helping folks get more out of their computers for years. The club has a myriad of users' groups devoted to Windows, the Internet, novice users and more, all of which are great forums for finding knowledgeable users who can help with your problems. Go to its Web site -- www.pcug.com -- for more information, a schedule of meetings and a message board where members help each other out with computer problems.

On the Mac side, the Madison Macintosh Users Group offers the same kind of help for Apple devotees. The MacGalaxy Web site -- www.macgalaxy.com -- has details