Washington Apple Pi

A Community of Apple iPad, iPhone and Mac Users

The February General Meeting of the Washington Apple Pi was held on February 29, 1998 at the Ernst Community and Cultural Center of the Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Virginia. This month, our featured presenters were Synergy Sales and Marketing, the local manufacturer's representative for UMAX, Iomega and Micronet Storage products.

The meeting began, as usual, with the Question and Answer session, moderated with characteristic aplomb by Pi Secretary and Webmaster Lawrence Charters. This was followed by announcements, including a reminder that the Pi is offering the Pi Fillings CD-ROM that contains all system updates from System 7.1 on and lots of other goodies.

Jeff Boyd of Synergy Sales and Marketing (http://www.synergysales.com/) opened the program with an overview of his company and of the UMAX product line of MacOS computers, scanners and other products (see http://www.umax.com/ or http://www.micronet.com/.) He brought along one of the new S900 G3 computers that UMAX is now delivering. He also frankly discussed the licensing issues facing UMAX as one of the two remaining "clone makers." Hopefully, Apple will continue the licensing program. He brought along Ed Meurer, the Virginia territory manager from Synergy Sales and Marketing and John Watkins from MicroNet who is their Eastern regional manager.

The recent price cuts on Apple and UMAX products make this a great time to buy that new computer you've been lusting after. The S900 Base 250 MHz G3 Machine is now $2,995 and it includes a two-year warranty. (Actually, due to licensing restrictions the computer comes with a 150MHz 604 processor and the UMAX edition fo the MaxPowr Pro+ processor upgrade. You must install the upgrade yourself.) There is also a special deal running on the C600 and J700 series computers. If you buy one before April 30, 1998 you get a free Scanner!

Next Jeff went over the UMAX Scanner line. There are lots of options here, with scanners selling under $200 to well over $8,000. That's a really wide range and there are a wide range of hardware and software bundle differences which account for the price range.

The newest product in the line is the UMAX Mirage II. This scanner is definitely a top of the line, professional unit, retailing at $8,395. It has two lenses and an 11.4 x 17 inch bed and can scan at 1,400 x 2,800 dpi and includes binuscan Photo Perfect and Magic Scan software and Kodak CMS and Magic Match and transparency holders for 35mm and 4x5 negatives.

After briefly touching on the other UMAX products, Jeff turned the meeting over to Ed Meurer to demo the UMAX hardware and binuscan software.

There's little you can do to demo a computer, really, so after a brief tour of the S900, we launched right into the scanner demos. Unfortunately, the computer used for the demo had multiple versions of the scanner software installed which seemed to cause various problems, but a fall back to previously scanned images allowed us to see the color enhancement capabilities of the binuscan software.

Next, John Watkins took the floor to tell us about Micronet storage products. Micronet is a long established name in the storage business and has a line of hard disks, CD-ROM and CDR, and RAID storage. RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a method of providing fault-tolerant high-speed, high-capacity storage at a reasonable price.

He brought with him their Data Dock 7000 with triple, hot pluggable power supplies and fan modules and slots for 7 storage bays. Each of the seven bays can hold a 2,4, 9 or 18GB hard drive, 50GB AIT tape backup, CD-ROM or CDR drive, rewritable optical disc or 24GB DAT tape drive, all on a single SCSI bus. Not something we would probably buy for our home computer, but some of us work at locations with large networks that use this type of equipment.

The meeting closed with the Door Prize drawing as usual and was adjourned at 11:42.

Door Prize Winners:

Congratulations to all of our prizewinners and thanks to Claris Corporation and Synergy Sales and Marketing for donating the prizes to the Pi. Thans also to Lawrence for moderating the questions and answer session with his usual aplomb, and to Lorin, Beth, David, Dana and the numerous others who help make this meeting happen 10 times a year. Thanks also to the wonderful staff of NOVA who cheerfully help us every month.

Next month: Microsoft Office 98.

Send meeting comments to: don.essick@tcs.wap.org.