Do you have a really favourite web page, such as bank account or webmail site? Then put an icon on your desktop. When you have accessed the site in your browser, restore your browser to a window (so you can see the desktop alongside), then click on the icon on the left of the address bar and drag it onto your desktop. When you double click on the shortcut, it will open up your browser, start the dial up, and open with your favourite page. 

To include an HTML file with backgrounds images etc, create page in HTML editor, save on your hard drive, then: Outlook Express/ Tools/ Options/ Compose/ Stationery/ Mail/ Select/ Browse etc.

If you are downloading emails in Outlook Express and the process seems to hang indefinitely, it’s likely that you have a very large attachment with one of your emails, which will take a long time to download, or an incoming email with an error. Either way this email will block the remainder of your emails from being downloaded.

You need to visit your ISP’s webmail service, which most ISPs offer. This operates in exactly the same way as Hotmail, Yahoo mail and many others. You can access your mail through your web browser by visiting the site (eg www.hotmail.com) and log in using your account details (See webmail above). The difference doing it with your own ISP is that you can access your mailbox in the same way without downloading the contents. The ISP webmail site will list your incoming emails and attachments in exactly the same way as with Outlook Express, but without the download, won’t hang things up. You can decide this point what to do:

• Delete the offending email, or read the contents online but don’t download the attachment.
• Send a new email to the sender requesting him/her to resend without the attachment, or to reduce the size of the attachment to a reasonable size, say less than 1MByte, which takes about 15 mins.

At this point you can either:

• Read the rest of your mail and reply as necessary – this will mean the your mail won’t be downloaded into Outlook Express, and may mean remaining online for the duration, or
• Logout of your ISPwebmail area and close down your browser, open Outlook Express, and press Send and Receive to download the remaining email to your local inbox.

Then close the session.

A virus is spread by some action on the part of the recipient, by inadvertently activating a program such as an email attachment.

A worm spreads through its own programming, scanning the internet fro a suitable host replicating itself, and then looking for new hosts.

Do you start typing away only to find that your CAPS LOCK is on? Select your capitalised text, then press the <control>+F3 keys. Or click menu | format | change case and select the function you want.