President's Corner: New Hardware Study Group         by David Robbins, President, CCOKC    August 2005      I am starting a new Hardware Study Group in August. This Study Group is scheduled to meet on the third Saturday at 10:00 am.      I picked Saturday so everyone could attend and the subject covered will be, as always, most anything dealing with computers. This will not be a programming or troubleshooting group for software, but if there may be someone with the same software at the meeting that may have the answer to your problem, who knows. The third Saturday was chosen so that your upgrade questions can be answered before The Saturday Sale; this will allow you to make more informed and better purchases.      I will show you how to turn that old hard drive that has been lying around the house into an external, USB 2 drive for less than $40. There are many advantages to having an external drive such as extra storage or another place to put the backup copy of your data. This does not require opening the case to put it to use, simply plug it in, copy or backup data and then unplug. The data on the drive is now inaccessible to hackers, viruses, etc.      If you have a question for a specific computer, bring some information with you, motherboard book, type and speed of cpu, type and amount of ram. There are some third party programs that will list this information. BelArc is one of them; this is a pretty good program and can be easily found on the Internet.      I will also discuss some of the changes we are seeing in the newer computers. Do you know that the newer motherboards require a 24-pin main power supply connector? What does this mean?     David Robbins is President of the Computer Club of Oklahoma City. David can be reached at   David Robbins