Editorial

Welcome to Issue 53 of SynTax and thanks to all of you who entered
last issue's competition. I think my moaning about previous lack
of entries had some effect; ah, the power of the sympathy vote!
Anyway, full details of the results are in the appropriate section
but I'd like to congratulate Jenny Perry here as well on being the
lucky winner. Well done, Jenny, I hope you enjoy the game. I'd
like to have another competition soon so watch this space ...

Well done to Bev Truter for spotting the error which had been
running since issue 47 in the contributions section!  We ended up
with two James Jillians in the list for Issue 52, one with 38.2
points and the other with 40.4 points! I'd added on his points for
2 reviews in Issue 47 (making 40.4) but not removed his old total
(of 28.1), then in Issue 48 I'd added another 10.1 for his Z
review onto the 28.1 total (still with me?) so ... his true total
is 50.5. Phew ... got there in the end.

A bit of good news - I have almost solved my system crashes.
Until recently, the PC was still falling over at the slightest
provocation.  I had a series of crashes each time I closed a
program - in the end I suggested to Alex that, as the 'close
window' WAV was playing in a sort of loop, that I could try
disabling it. 'Why not?' he said, so that's what I did and after
that things were considerably better. Alex suggested I reinstalled
DirectX 5 to see if that improved matters but when I tried, the
setup program told me that it didn't need reinstalling. I thought
at that point that it was a sound card problem, maybe caused by
mine being an OPTi SoundBlaster clone, and I had noticed that the
sound in The Feeble Files was distinctly choppy.

I thought that maybe I'd better treat myself to a proper sound
card. But then I went to start Curse of Monkey Island and that
seized up completely on the map loading screen. I muttered a few
choice words and checked out the Sierra site on the Net - which
told me to reinstall DirectX 5 ... I noticed when I tried to do
this (again) that it still didn't want to do it, but it noted that
my sound card driver wasn't certified so, back onto the Net (how
did I manage without it before?) and I scoured the chatlines,
finally finding a group of people with OPTi cards, moaning about
the same problem. Their messages pointed me in the direction of
the OPTi site and some new drivers. Since installing THOSE, COMI
runs fine and I have had only an occasional crash. So fingers
crossed, and I hope that will be the end of the problem.

I must say how useful I am finding the Microsoft Support Online
section on the Net. I gather it's what the technical bods at
Microsoft use when you ring their helplines. You select the
program you're having problems with, and a few keywords (eg
invalid page fault, kernel32.dll), and it will list alternative
solutions.  So far it has sorted out problems for me with MS
Publisher, IE4 and Office. You can find it at:

http://support.microsoft.com/support

Well, I think that's about it. Thanks to all this issue's
contributors - the mag is looking even more lively each issue. And
it's nice to see some new names in the contributors list. Next
issue is award time (doesn't it come round quickly?) so keep those
reviews etc coming, please!

See you in May!

                                                     Sue













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