History
The Computer Club - formerly known as the RADSTOCK.PCW User Group, was started by myself, Adrian Hooper, in January 1996, as an informal meeting for a group for people using the Amstrad PCW series of computers. This was the only user group supporting that type of computer within the Bath area. During the next 3 years the club grew, having over 40 members at one time. However, the Amstrad PCWs were getting old (anything up to 14 years old being common), and are now very unreliable, and hard to keep going, and so all the members have now moved onto PCs and/or Macs.
In 1999 the club was relaunched as "The Computer Club" (nobody was able to think up anything better), and has generated a lot of interest in the area. The club is now running as a support group for all computer users, whatever ability, mainly based on PCs running Microsoft Windows, though Linux, MAC, UNIX etc. users are all welcome!
Meetings
We currently meet on the second and fourth Friday of nearly every month, at the Radstock Methodist Church Hall. Membership currently carries an annual fee of £10.00, and an extra fee of £1.00 per person for every meeting attended - this extra fee is waived for certain meetings, and new members are welcome to join us for their first meeting free of charge.
Meetings usually start at 7.30pm, and finish somewhere between 9 and 9.30pm (though anything up to 11pm can be the case if the members really get involved in the subject), with refreshments available at the end. During the evening there is usually a talk or a "hands on" session prepared, but people are welcome to ask questions at any stage - it is not unknown for the talk to be abandoned if there is a particularly interesting question! To find out what we will be looking at in future meetings, please select the link on the left. In general the first meeting each month will have a 15 minutes general question session at the beginning of it, with meetings dedicated to questions from the club members being held regularly throughout the year.
Online Resources
The club offers several resources online. First is obviously this website, which will be used as a general store of almost everything produced for the club. The site has a FAQ system running, which will have questions and answers added whenever possible.
There is also a forum running from this site, this can be used to discuss issues, ask questions etc. Please click the Forum link at the top of the screen to visit it.
Finally, we have an email list which all club members are a part of - so that information about meetings, or other important news (virus outbreaks are one example) can be distributed efficiently.
If you would like any further information, please use the contact us page, linked at the top of this page.