We had a great meeting on May 10th. If you missed it you passed up a real opportunity to learn more about Windows 8.

Our program for May featured a presentation on the next version of Windows – Windows 8. Brian Hitney, Developer / Evangelist from Microsoft gave us an in depth preview of Microsoft’s next operating system. He knows his subject and did a great job of explaining Windows 8 for all prospective users. At our meeting we had time to examine this all important new operating system and to focus on those things that matter to us as individual users.

In his presentation, Brian showed us how Windows 8 has been reimagined to support a wide variety of users and form factors: from tablets to desktops, netbooks and laptops. The new start screen offers a fresh way to interact with applications. It is fast and fluid, and works superbly with touch screens as well as more traditional mouse and keyboards. Throughout the presentation, we explored many of the new features and as promised, got some individual hands on time with the Samsung Slate running the latest Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

It’s wonderful to have access to the best speakers on subjects such as this directly through Microsoft. Brian Hitney did a great job of explaining this new operating system and answering our questions. Thanks to Brian and Microsoft for a most insightful and informative program.

We had an outstanding meeting on Tuesday, March 8th: Our program was “TV on the Internet – An Alternative to Expensive Cable and Satellite”. Our presenters were Ludwig Albl and his son Alex. Both have been members of this club for several years. Thanks to both these gentlemen for an interesting and informative program.

As part of cutting the family budget, Ludwig and Alex described how they had been experimenting with alternative and cheaper ways of getting their television programming for several years. Over the course of that time they had discovered and refined three principal ways to do this: Public air wave antenna, Internet TV, and Free on air satellite TV. They had investigated all of the above methods and they shared their online resources and experiences with us. Discussion centered on various TV antennas (the cheapest option) and the on-line resources available. They displayed these topics in Power Point and discussed the pros and cons for each. Their PowerPoint presentations are available at the following link.

Ludwig is an aircraft engineer and works in the USAir maintenance facility at the Charlotte Airport. The family moved here from Winston-Salem in 1997 and Ludwig and Alex have been coming to PC3 Meetings since 2008. Alex is a junior in HS, a newly minted Eagle Scout and loves paintballing. Ludwig brings us some of his advanced electronics skill from his Aircraft experience. Alex dabbles in computer repair for family and friends. He is CompTIA A+ Certified for Computer Repair.

If there are any additional questions or comments for our speakers, let’s follow up with this on Facebook and/or the PC3 forum. Direct your question to our Facebook page and I’m sure someone will get back. The resource page handout, below that was published in the newsletter is also on the PC3 Forum.

Our PC3 meeting for January featured a presentation on a subject many of us have been dealing with for some time – SmartPhones: “Everything You’ve Wanted to Know about SmartPhones”.

Our program was presented by a particularly knowledgeable team of professionals in this area, Charles Canady, Amy Johnson and Zach Pulliam. Charles is the Cell Phone Department Manager for Best Buy at the Midtown location and Amy and Zach are Sales Associates. As such they represent most of the major cell phone brands and are leading resellers of SmartPhones in this region. Charles has been working in this business for 10+ years. Charles and his associates, Amy and Zach, did a great job of presenting this cutting edge technology in a way we could all understand and relate to. They demonstrated a number of phones, and gave us their opinions on the issues involved with each. This turned out to be a great source of information and recommendations. Thanks to Charles and his associates for an interesting and informative presentation.

We took advantage of this first meeting of the New Year to steer the PC3 into somewhat new territory. Our program covered a side of personal computing that has captured more and more of the public’s attention: SmartPhones. That is the convergence of mobile telephony, computing and web browsing all rolled into one handily portable device.

Everyone in our club has a cell phone of some sort. Several of our members have recently upgraded to the more sophisticated SmartPhones. Many, however, including yours truly, are still checking in on old flip or bar feature phones. I can tell you I’ve been looking for some time and what I’ve found is that from one month to the next more new products are displayed and they just get more complex. There are so many variables to consider: cost, of course; geographical coverage; number of calls, texts, internet usage per month and features such as Apps, Support, Bluetooth, 3G or 4G bandwidth and on and on. At some point I think we all realize we’re all going to have to find a way to deal with these issues.

Cell phones are evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up with what’s available let alone make an informed decision which one best fits your needs. Our meeting was a big step forward in coming to grips with all this. Our speakers, the Consumer Reports Magazine article and Bill Barnes’ Newsletter article were great assets in getting ahead of these issues. Getting a handle on what the local experts are saying was particularly helpful: What brands and models do they like? Who can support these technological marvels most effectively? What are the best deals right now? All questions we got answers for as the presentation unfolded.

Again, thanks to all our contributors for an exciting and instructive meeting.

Special kudos to Bill Haney – winner of the Kindle Touch!

We had a great meal – Beef Wellington! – with salad, veges and pumpkin cheesecake. Once again a fantastic dinner and good folks to talk too.