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1st November 2002

FREE CDS - THEY MAY BE MORE VALUABLE THAN YOU THINK

Brian Grainger

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brian@grainger1.freeserve.co.uk


 

As another CD-ROM comes through my letterbox to try the Freeserve Anytime package I am reminded of the oft heard cry, "What use can we put these unwanted CD-ROMs to?" It was recently aired in the Daily Telegraph's 'Over to You' column.

Before you turn unwanted freebee CD-ROMs into Frisbees, mobiles or bird scarers I would advise caution. Have a look what is on them first. You may think it is a load of unwanted junk, but sometimes you can be surprised. Recent buyers of PCs containing Windows XP may be especially interested in the Freeserve offering, as will be explained below.

When you get a new CD-ROM stick it into a CD drive and press the shift key until the CD-ROM is recognised and the drive lights stop flashing. Doing this will stop any autostart sequence from commencing. After all, the last thing you want to do is install Freeserve Anytime!

Now use Windows Explorer, My Computer, or your favourite disk browsing tool, to look at the files on the CD-ROM. Do this a few times and you will become very familiar with the folders that hold the Internet Explorer setup files. What you are looking for are the other folders. In the past I have found some quite useful stuff on these disks.

A previous copy of the Tiscali ISP disk came with Acrobat Reader 5, HotMetalPro 6 Evaluation copy, Paint Shop Pro 7.01 Evaluation copy, Winzip 8 and the CuteFTP program.

A LineOne disk came with some games and CuteFTP again.

Netscape Online, when it existed, provided a copy of Netscape Communicator, the alternative to Internet Explorer.

Tiny Online had a whole host of stuff including Games and network tools written by ICL, such as an FTP program and a Ping program.

When the Freeserve Anytime CD-ROM came it did not appear to have much of use. All it had was Internet Explorer version 6 and a directory named MSJVM with an appropriate file in it. Now I correctly surmised that MSJVM stood for Microsoft Java Virtual Machine. As I run Windows 98 and IE4, which already has JVM included, I was not too bothered. I kept the disk anyway.

Some time later a regular contact, Bob Harris, rang me up. He had recently moved from Windows 98 to XP, against my recommendations I might add! He found that a program he used to run now complained that it could not find certain files. These files related to the JVM. I knew that, because of a lawsuit from Sun, Windows XP no longer shipped with the JVM installed. I advised Bob to go search the Microsoft site for their JVM or the Sun site for that version. Bob came back saying that the Microsoft JVM was no longer on the site. I investigated and sure enough it was removed in July 2002. What was worse was that they would introduce it later, presumably in a form that did not contravene the agreement of the lawsuit, but that it would only be available from Microsoft with a charge attached. It would not be freely downloadable as before.

Fortunately the first Freeserve disk arrived a week later, so I could send a copy of the JVM, still distributed on the disk, to Bob.

I would advise anybody who has XP to get hold of this CD-ROM, just in case they need the JVM in the future. If Freeserve have not sent you a disk in the post then pop in to Dixons or Currys and grab one before the distribution stops. You have been warned.


 

 

 

 


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