President’s Message

By Tom Burt

General Meetings

Our Thursday, June 5 meeting will feature a presentation  by Club Vice President and Education Coordinator Bill Wilkinson.  Bill will provide an overview of the revamped eBoard area of the Club web-site.

For July 3, because the meeting date falls the day before the Friday, July 4, Independence Day holiday, your SCSCC Board decided this year to not have a general meeting.

Constitution and Bylaws

After much additional effort by your president, we finally have a 2008 Club constitution that is acceptable to the Club and to the CCOC.  Your SCSCC board ratified it and we are awaiting final official approval by the CCOC and the SCSCAI board.  We will keep you updated as to progress and status via the SCSCC_Admin list.  You can review the latest (hopefully final) version of the SCSCC 2008 Constitution here on the web-site at: ..\REPEAT_2008\SCSCC_Constitution_2008_Signed.pdf.

At the last SCSCC board meeting, we concluded that since the club constitution is now aligned with the CCOC model constitution, and that since all the changes imposed by the CCOC were to bring our constitution into conformance with the latest CCOC policies, the changes are not a member or board initiated constitutional amendment.  Accordingly, we have decided that there is no point to taking a formal vote to approve.

Lab Student PCs - Vista SP1

The Lab Maintenance Team has been installing the Windows Vista Service pack 1 update on the student and instructor PCs.  As I write, 8 PCs have been updated.  We expect to finish updating all of the PCs by early May.  Each of the PCs has the entire 444MB Vista SP1 setup file in a folder on the C: drive at C:\WindowsVistaSP1_32bit.  If you are a dial-up Vista user, you can bring a blank CD to the lab during Open lab hours and burn your own copy of the SP1 setup.

Membership

As of May 25, our 2008 SCSCC paid memberships total 1170.

Education Activities for June

As usual, we have a great line-up of classes, seminars and SIGs for June. See the June calendar as well as the Seminars, Classes and “SIGs and KKs” pages for full details. Our education program is one of the great benefits of belonging to the Club. No matter what your experience or skill level, you should find something to suit your needs.  June will future a revamped version of the Boot Camp class, oriented more to Windows Vista.

Windows XP Service Pack 3

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is now available via Windows Update and the MS Download Center.  For the benefit of our dial-up users, we have placed copies of the full SP3 setup on three of the lab PCs: LAB02, LAB15 and LAB16.  These are the three PCs on the wall that divides the lab and the classroom.  The SP3 setup program is in the folder: C:\Windows_XP_SP3.  You can copy the SP3 setup to your own CD or flash drive and take it home to install on your own PC.

Caution for users with Hewlett Packard desktop PCs that have an AMD CPU...  SP3 can send your PC into an infinite reboot loop.  There is a fix that you can apply before installing SP3.  For full details about SP3 issues and the patch, click the following hyperlink: http://tinyurl.com/6zs52d

Caution for users having copies of XP of "questionable origin"... SP3 adds more stringent checking for valid XP licenses.  Installing SP3 on a Windows XP that was not installed with a valid product key may cause that copy to be flagged as "not genuine".