By Doug Mullis, Secretary, Tampa PC Users Group
dmullis@tampabay.rr.com

Member at Large Mary Sheridan started the SIG portion of our meeting at 6:40pm. Mary showed us how to make desktop icons transparent and demonstrated Yahoo’s see-thru calendar. Get with Mary if you are interested in installing these features on your PC.

Ed White asked why he has lost Calculator and Notepad from his Accessories menu. No one had an immediate answer.

At about 6:55 pm, Mary launched into the business portion of our meeting as President John Witmer was out of the room. Mike Hodges summarized the FACUG Spring Conference held the weekend before (Mar. 4 & 5). TPCUG had six representatives in attendance. Mary got a round of applause for guiding the FACUG over the past year as President. Vendors were few this year but included Microsoft, Smart Computing, Panda Software and Corel, who all sponsored meals. Lapworks provided carry bags and general sponsors were Chronicles Software, Linspire and User Group Relations.

At the conference, Mike headed up a roundtable on “How Friendly Is Your User Group?” The number one suggestion for making your meetings friendlier was to have nametags. The conference spans a two-day period and many sessions are designed to help the officers run their group.

At this point Mary introduced the TPCUG officers. Merle Nicholson asked that we mention the providers of door prizes at each meeting, as vendors do not provide all. We have some generous members and want to recognize them for providing the interest that door prizes add to our meetings. Mike and I will make sure this is done.

At 7:10 pm, our speaker for the evening, Blain Barton of Microsoft, was introduced. His topics were Windows Vista and Office 12; however, he first told us about Microsoft’s Campus Connection program. This is a pilot program for going around to Florida colleges to educate students on current computer technologies. It started at USF and quickly caught on at Miami-Dade. Blain is quite excited about this program that has been in existence for about 18 months.

So, why change to Vista? XP has been around for five years, and many improvements have been incorporated into Windows Vista including better performance and security, improved email service, speech recognition, visual folder stacks, full index searches, fewer reboots and “hangs,” and the ability to communicate with “smart phones.”

Hardware requirements include a 32 or 64 bit processor with a speed of 3 GHz or better, 1 Gig or more of RAM recommended and a PCI Express or equivalent video card for starters. Recently acquired PCs will most likely be compatible with and upgradeable to Vista.

Blain indicated Windows Vista would hit the market around Thanksgiving of this year (Microsoft has since changed the release to early 2007). Two versions will initially be offered: the Basic Edition for budget users not requiring advanced media support (AERO Glass will not be included in this version); and the Ultimate Edition that will include AERO Glass, pod-casting support renamed by Microsoft as “blogcasting”, a game performance tweaker, DVD ripping capabilities and possibly online services for downloadable media. This edition is designed for the high end PC user, gamers, multimedia professionals and PC enthusiasts.

Blain then demonstrated Vista so that we could see the improvements and features of Vista turning Glass on and off. Movie Maker was very impressive. Next he demonstrated the voice recognition capabilities of Office 12 by issuing a variety of commands, which were properly interpreted after several repeats. Then Power Point 2007 was plugged, obviously due for release next year.

Tomorrow’s technologies - such as facial recognition, central communications panels, information clustering, collaborative workspaces and radio frequency identification - were mentioned as sneak previews. We watched a short video demonstrating how video conferencing technology of the future could be utilized.

Blain says he will be back in September if we will have him to take up where he left off tonight. Microsoft provided eight door prizes to be raffled off. The winners were:

• Adobe Photoshop won by Gary Ennis
• Optical Mouse won by Todd Grubb
• Game Pack won by Robbie Randall
• Game Pack won by Jim Purcell
• X P Book won by Doug Mullis
• Microsoft T Shirt won by ?
• X P Book won by Bruce Register
• Microsoft T Shirt won by Jim Purcell

We took in $82 on the sale of raffle tickets. Thank you, Microsoft.

The meeting adjourned at 8:40 pm u