Hi everyone, hope you’ve all been having a very Happy New Year!

I’ve contacted HTC, who are going to launch Australia’s first 4G smartphone next week (on the day of our main meeting), as well as a separate company called Mr Mobile, to see if either, or both, are available to present.

Clearly, having left the invitations so late, I won’t know until Monday as to whether or not either company can come, but so far there’s definitely hope that either, or both, will actually be there. I’ll also be making some more enquiries on Monday to see who else I can rustle up at short notice, which of course is a situation entirely of my own making.

So… apologies that this message isn’t specifying a specific, locked-in presenter, but whatever happens, we will have a presenter there – even if I need to appear via Skype to do so, although I’ll naturally be working to get a major presenter there, complete with prizes of some kind.

I’ll ask John [Mathews, our Newsletter Guru - Ed.] to send out another e-mail with details as soon as at least one of the potential presenters is locked in, which should hopefully happen on Monday, if not over the weekend, so… please have a great weekend, and expect to hear more on Monday!

Cheers,
Alex.

It’s the last main meeting of the year, and we’ve got two presenters to jam pack the meeting with lots of great information, and some fantastic prizes!

Both have presented at the SPCUG in the past.

First at 6.30pm will be Rene Sugo from MyNetFone, and then at 7.15pm, last month’s presenter, Renato Catalan, returns, to show us Kingston’s latest USB drives with special features for consumers and businesses, as well as one of the thinnest notebook PC’s in the world – Acer’s brand new Ultrabook.

Rene Sugo is the Technical Director of MyNetFone, and he’ll be briefing us on new developments in VoIP & internet for consumers and businesses, including the growth of Naked DSL and how the introduction of Number Portability is affecting VoIP vs. landline usage. The presentation will also cover how the NBN rollout will dramatically shift the telecommunications channels from landlines to VoIP in the longer term.

Some interesting key facts will be provided from the results of a recent VoIP industry survey, which reveal some interesting trends already underway.

Rene will also explain to us the latest VoIP features and devices for both consumers and businesses, and new trends in VoIP plans that deliver even better value than ever.

Rene’s prize is valued at over $350, and includes:

-       modern, European-designed Siemens A580IP cordless VoIP handset;

-       with 1 Free year on the MegaSaver Premium Yearly plan;

-       the plan includes 200 untimed local and Australia-wide calls and 200 minutes of calls to mobiles;

-       plus $10 extra call credit

After the break, Renato Catalan will be showing us three different Kingston USB drives, each with special new features that make them much more valuable than your basic $6.77 4GB USB stick from Officeworks, along with a show and tell of some of the other products he represents, and he’ll then show us Acer’s new ultra-thin Ultrabook running Windows 7.

Renato will have some Kensington and other prizes for the raffle, so along with the MyNetFone prize which includes a year’s worth of telephone calls (amazing!!!!) it’s a meeting to be at for info on the latest in VoIP and consumer electronics products, and an excellent chance of winning something cool in the raffle.

See you there!
Cheers,
Alex

Wow – it’s October already, and our second last Main Meeting of the year!

At Tuesday night’s meeting we have the well-known hard disk maker, Western Digital (WD) coming along to present their latest and greatest wares.

Presenting will be Renato Catalan, WD’s local media representative, with a demo of two of WD’s newest products – their latest “media streamer” that turns any TV into a super media player, and WD’s new “personal cloud” technology, letting you access your data from anywhere – from your own “cloud” equipment – without the sky high costs that companies pay for cloud technology.

These two technologies are hot hot hot right now, and are sure to be popular presents this Christmas season too, whether for yourself, your family or friends – especially if you want to give something different to the norm.

Prizes up for grabs include a 1TB external WD hard drive valued at over $100, along with some WD marketing materials including funky WD-branded kid’s watches and some WD-themed T-Shirts.

So, come along to the main meeting, see the interesting news and sites that Robert Israel has discovered, see what gadgets line Alex’s pockets this week, get your questions answered as we answer questions, and see the latest in high tech consumer gadgetry from Western Digital!

Cheers,

Alex

Hi everyone,

We were supposed to have CUDO come along this month, but they pulled out at the last minute which makes things difficult. I’m attempting to sort out another company and hope to have more info before Tuesday.

Until then, the backup plan is in place: a sneak peek at Microsoft’s Windows 8, thanks to Microsoft’s recent BUILD Conference in California.

Indeed, we’ll have a look at some Windows 8 stuff no matter who is our guest presenter next week, with Windows 8 shaping up to be a very interesting blend of an iPad-like system mixed with the Windows XP and 7 we all know very well. It could be the first real challenger to Apple, given the fact Google’s tablets haven’t been as popular as iPads.

So… I hope a real presenter comes through, but if not, we’ll definitely have fun, we’ll learn a lot, get some questions answered and some answers questioned, and marvel just how close we already are to the end of the year.

See you on Tuesday night!

Alex

“I sincerely apologise for the inconvenience. Venue hire is not open on Saturdays and thus the library is required to setup for any Saturday events. We have spoken to the Saturday librarian about this matter. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Once again I do apologise and am happy to provide your Saturday 17th September room free of charge.”

We were locked out of our Saturday afternoon first floor meeting room.

We set up shop in the long end-room because that meeting had zero attendees. There were 3 meetings scheduled for 2pm; two rooms were unlocked, but ours was locked.

At least the after-hours phone number worked; the guy arrived half an hour later and opened the room for us. He didn’t know why we were locked out because he said he was just a contractor! What a cop-out!

A thoughtless Friday night cleaning-person perhaps?

“Our first meeting at 280 Pitt Street.
There was no key! or lift access. October 2004.”

This month we have Ninemsn back to tell us about the brand new version of Windows Live Messenger, still the world’s most popular instant messaging program.

Presenting will be Mikaela Lancaster, head of Windows Live Australia, and the Australian Windows Live Messenger product manager, Adam Ireland.

Adam’s summary states that: “Windows Live Messenger (formerly known as MSN Messenger) is Australia’s #1 IM chat service. The latest product offering, Messenger 2011, allows users to connect via HD video chat and unique social integration. This presentation is designed to demonstrate how you can connect with the people that matter to you most via Windows Live Messenger.”

Sounds like Microsoft wants to make sure its own Windows Live Messenger service stays capable despite the pending Microsoft/Skype acquisition!

So… see you at the August Main Meeting for the usual Questions & Answers, stellar site selections, prizes and more!

Alex

Rolf Hansen, the CEO and Founder of Amaysim is coming to the Sydney PC Users Group to tell us how his company is really shaking up and lowering the costs of phone calls and mobile data in Australia, with a very popular and value packed new “unlimited” pre-paid deal, alongside Amaysim’s original ultra-low priced “pay-as-you-go” SIM pre-paid plan launched in the second half of last year.

I’ve personally become a pre-paid member myself because it is just that good, and for anyone that isn’t stuck on a contract or who absolutely must be on the Telstra network for its extra range and fastest 3G mobile broadband speeds, and is happy to pay Telstra’s much higher prices to do so, Amaysim’s offer to the market is potentially the most compelling and surprisingly affordable pre-paid SIM on the market – without any of Julia Gillard’s “hyperbowl” intended whatsoever.

There’ll be a couple of free Amaysim Unlimited SIM cards with one free month of activation to be won in the raffle, giving you 30 days of unlimited calls to regular home and office landlines and regular mobile phones in Australia, unlimited text messages to Australian mobiles, unlimited access to the most popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and 4GB of 3.5G mobile broadband data over the Optus 3.5G network.

Robert Israel will open the meeting and share his selection of interesting websites and new technologies, while I squeeze in some information about the new HP TouchPad tablet that will have launched earlier on Tuesday, and will then help with the regular Q&A session that precedes the break which we might have to shorten a little.

This is because Rolf Hansen from Amaysim needs to leave at 7.45pm. It would be good if we could break earlier than normal at say 6.45pm or so, giving time for Rolf to start at 7pm and still have plenty of time for his presentation, questions from everyone and the raffle draw before he leaves.

So… it will be a jam packed main meeting that’s well worth attending – see you on Tuesday night!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Hi everyone!

The main meeting is nearly upon us, and our main meeting presenter is Mikaela Lancaster from NineMSN and Microsoft’s “Windows Live” team.

Here we’ll learn that Hotmail will celebrate its 15^th Birthday in July, we’ll learn about “key features” that “people may not be familiar with” such as the mysterious-sounding “sweep function”, we’ll learn about the SkyDrive service and “Active View”, and we’ll learn some “fun Hotmail facts”.

Naturally, Mikaela Lancaster will also be able to answer any questions we might have, and if history is any guide, we’ll have plenty of questions for Ms Lancaster to cast her eye over!

I’ll also be at next week’s main meeting for the question and answer session, so see you at the main meeting!
Cheers,
Alex

We were then forced to reinstall XP afresh. This, of course, knocked out the dual-boot menu we had before. Microsoft warned us about this “Install the older OS first, then the later one”. Well, Windows 7 worked perfectly, so we weren’t about to reinstall that — just XP.

We tried downloading EasyBCD (which we were assured runs on XP) to construct a boot menu. Unfortunately, with a newly installed XP, it did not have any Service Packs installed. EasyBCD used the .NET Framework which, of course, failed to install. This left XP in a strange state (not recognizing USB memory sticks), although after initial XP installation they were recognized correctly.

We then booted from the Windows 7 Installation disc and reconstructed the boot menu.

We may now have to reinstall XP to get it back on its feet.