Head down to the Start button, click on it, and then select the Run... menu item.

1 Type regedit in the Run edit box and hit the Enter key.

2 Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and look for lnkfile

3 Right-click on it, select the New menu item, and click on String Value.

4 Rename the newly-created value to IsShortcut

5 Don't put anything into the Value Data field; just click on the OK button.

6 If all has gone well, the IsShortcut value will link the shortcut in Network Neighbourhood to Web Folders. You should then be able to see your shortcuts after you create them.

As you say, it would be very inconvenient to look up each local access number. UK users are lucky in that we have 'virtual Pop. (0845 numbers) which are charged at local call rates throughout the whole of the UK (at least from BT phones). Few other countries have similar systems, elsewhere networks such as CompuServe have a national toll-free number that you can use to obtain the correct local access point. Your best bet is to research local access before you start on your journey. The roaming systems come with databases that give you the correct local access number and other information required to connect.

Add in the management headaches of setting up and running a Web server, and you'll find it costs far less to pay a Web-hosting provider {such as my favourite, Pair.Com) to host your Web site. This is also the best solution to any security concerns: while a properly configured server won't be a security threat, not allowing access to your computer at all is the best safeguard against accidental security lapses. This may change when high-bandwidth permanently connected cable TV modem or DSL services become available. Unfortunately the UK is lagging far behind the US in this respect. ADSL Intemet service, with download speeds up to 1.5Mbit/s or 50 times modem speeds, is now becoming available in many areas of the USA at around $40 {£25) a month with installation and a 'modem' for less than $200. Here BT has only a trial service going and, at the time of writing, hadn't announced prices for the service that should commence in March 2000. However, according to Adrian Mardlin of local Buckinghamshire ISP Nildram, its proposed wholesale prices total around £1,500 a year suggesting retail prices of £150 to £200 a month. And that's for a service offering just 512Kbit/s maximum download speed. Clearly BT is reluctant to give up all that call revenue from Internet users.

While Oftel has announced that it will force BT to lease its copper wires to competitors wishing to provide ADSL services, that's not scheduled to start until July 2001. Although some commentators have suggested the cost of renting the copper line might be around £100 a year making it possible to offer ADSL service for as little as £300 a year -you can be sure that BT will do its best to argue for a higher price. After all they are going to have to find some way to justify the exorbitant fees that they have been charging businesses for leased data lines for years, and competitors could just as easily use those leased copper wires to provide leased data circuits for business use.

Fire up Internet Explorer and head for the Tools menu (View menu in Internet Explorer 4) and select the Internet Options menu item.

Make sure the General tab is selected, then click on the Delete Files button in the Temporary Internet Files section.

Once the files have been deleted, click on the Settings button in the same frame and then on the View Objects button.

Look for the CV3 Class file and, if you find one, right-click on it, select the Remove menu option and then on Yes (if you don't see that file don't fret, just move on through the steps).

Back on the General tab, click on the Clear History button and then on OK.

Close down Internet Explorer and head for the Run edit window, located via the Start button and the Run menu item.

If you use Windows 9x, type the following: regsvr32 /u c:\windows\system\wuv3is.dll

If you use Windows NT 12000, type the following: regsvr32 /u c:\winnt\system32\wuv3is.dll

(Obviously, enter the folder name into which you chose to install Windows). Now that the control has been unregistered from the Registry (which is what the /u switch does), you can delete it from the System folder.

If you can't see the file in question, you'll need to switch to the Show All Files view. So head for Windows Explorer and, using either the View or Tools menus (depending on what operating system you're using) select the Folder Options menu item and make sure that Show all files or Show hidden files or folders is checked in the View tab.

Next, fire up Windows Explorer, expand the Program Files folder and then double-click on the Windows Update folder. Look for the file WUHISTV3.LOG, right-click on it, select Edit and then Invert Selection, and follow that up by hitting the Delete key. This will delete all files except the aforementioned WUHI.STV3.LOG file, which you don't want to get rid of as it holds your previous download history from the Update site. The last thing you want to do is try to remember where you were with updates that come along as quickly as the ones from the Windows Update centre.

You should now find that you'll be able to access the Update Centre. If you can't, then the problem is either that you have a firewall or something similar that's causing a connection problem for you, or because you have one of the anti-virus software packages installed that actually try to do battle with Windows Update.

You'l1 find a list of the programs that can cause this problem in this article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Q241234 You'll also find a link that talks about the problems caused by some proxy and firewall software. The article number is Q241783.

FrontPage only lets you password-protect an entire Web or subweb (a FrontPage Web created within another FrontPage Web). Select Tools I Security I Permissions. Tell the Permissions dialog to use unique permissions for this Web, click on Apply, then click on the Users tab.

Select the radio button 'Only registered users have browse access' and then on OK to change the permissions. You can then call up the Permissions dialog again to add users and their passwords. Next, email them and include the URL and username/password combination. You can't password-protect a single file from within FrontPage, but it's quite possible to work around this limitation in the software and password-protect a single page by creating a one-page subweb, setting its permissions, then linking to that page from the parent (or other) Web. As a matter of fact, this isn't a bad idea anyway; you should keep the interactive elements of your Web site separate from the rest.

As for the discussion group, the easiest way to apply protection is to use the Discussion Web Wizard. Select File I Open I Web, tell FrontPage where on the server to store the new Web, then fill in the details until you come to the question: 'Will the discussion take place in a protected Web?' Now click the 'Yes' button and keep going. The other point of confusion lies with the way FrontPage interacts with different servers. Knowing how to change permissions is all well and good, but it's useful only if the server co-operates. If you run your own Web server, no sweat, but if you're using a hosting service, you might not be able to do what you want. IIS uses Windows NT/2000's security, for example, and you have to add users through Windows NT/2000's administrative tools. Of course, you won't always have access to these. The security on Unix and Linux servers can be set in a variety of ways and not only might you be unable to add users or set permissions, but you might be completely unable to access the Permissions dialog through FrontPage (it might be greyed out). These are points to consider when you're signing up for your account in the first place.

The only good way to have mail sent to you directly from the browser is to use server-side code, probably a Perl or CGI script, or one of a few available ActiveX controls for ASP sites. These give you much more freedom. Because the server-side solutions can be scripted, you can put whatever contents you want in the message body and include as many recipients as you want-and there will be no browser or mailclient compatibility issues.

If you're using a hosted Web page, your hosting service almost certainly offers a script or ActiveX control that it will support. Check with the service. If you have the option of using your own server-side software, here are two Perl scripts you can use on almost any site:

There's also an ActiveX control available for ASP sites:

The trouble for data transmissions is that these coils have an upper cut-off frequency, which limit available bandwidth to around 3,000Hz. In addition, loading coils introduce phase delays, which are fine for voice but unacceptable for high-speed data. For information, here are the speeds you can expect for different available bandwidths:

56,000bit/s requires 3,600Hz

33,600bit/s requires 3,429Hz

31,200bit/s requires 3,200Hz

26,400bit/s requires 3,000Hz

24,000bit/s requires 2,800Hz

However, the snag is that voice calls only require 2700Hz bandwidth and unfortunately that's all most phone companies guarantee. While BT is gradually trying to replace long lines with local concentrators served by fibre optic, it will be a while yet before the whole network will be modernised.

Even close to the exchange, you will be lucky to get more than 40K to 50K (though some modems report better speeds than they actually achieve). You may want to try disconnecting all your internal wiring at the Master BT socket and then plugging your modem in there, to see if anything locally is affecting line conditions.

If the phone line is only being used for commuter or fax calls, you could ask your engineers to change the gain control from the default automatic to fixed gain but I wouldn't recommend this for voice lines, particularly out in the country.

You could also check with the engineers whether your line is being shared by the use of 'Dacs' equipment -which make one physical line serve two customers. The Dacs system is incompatible with 56K modems. But BT doesn't guarantee high speed data traffic unless you care to make the investment in an ISDN line such as their Home Highway system, or wait until ADSL becomes available in your area which may be never!

That being so, you need to look into other ways of protecting your copyright. For a start, both Gif and JPEG files allow the creator to insert comments, which can include a copyright message. You should also place your name and copyright information on the image itself, either on the margin or perhaps right across the centre, depending how strongly you are worried about copying. There are also search programs available which will help you locate Web sites using illegal copies of your material.

My own feeling is that the people who copy images are for the most part unable to afford to pay for them. So most copying does not cost you any sales. In fact, the presence of your pictures out there may act as an advertisement for your services and draw in paying customers. For this reason, I would allow copying but include a neat copyright message on each image in a position where it does not interfere with the subject, but away from the edge so that it would be hard to crop off.

3Com is a great company with some good products, but the Intemet Gaming Modem seems to be a product created for its marketing 'spin' rather than any fundamental technological advantage. Unless you are buying it for the free games included, the 3Com/USR Intemet Gaming Modem strikes me as an over-priced marketing gimmick. Sure, it claims big reductions in ping times but if you look at the 'independent test report' it quotes, you'll see that all except one of the comparisons are with controller-less software-based modems, where the CPU has to do most of the work. These would be expected to show longer ping times. Moreover the report did not show details, including software versions. And I suspect that the worst scores shown were due to buggy software and would have been fixed by updating to the latest drivers.

Let's say right from the start that any hardware-based modem will outperform a cheaper software-based one. That leaves us with one valid comparison with another hardware based modem, which showed an 11 percent improvement in ping times when connected to a 3Com host router and just a seven percent improvement connecting to an Ascend router.

Bear in mind that these are studies commissioned by 3Com and we have no way of telling whether this one modem was typical of other hardware modems or not. Some other testers using less formal methods, have failed to find any significant improvement in ping times comparing the Intemet Gaming Modem to other hardware based modems.

Secondly, the 3Com Gaming modem only gets these lower ping times when in a special 'gaming mode'. The instructions tell you to 'disable gaming mode to achieve optimum throughput'. That implies to me that 'gaming mode' simply reduces the V.90 connect speed, trading off throughput for stability.

Many modems allow you to do this by altering their advanced modem settings. Since a ping test does not exactly represent the pattern of data transferred by the game itself, optimising ping times at the expense of data transfer rates looks good, but is not necessarily going to improve game speed.

There's actually no single set of advanced AT commands. Even the venerable Hayes modem line included products with different command sets. As a result, it's likely that any third-party utility attempting to test the advanced modem commands may encounter some that don't work as expected. As long as you have documentation for the modem that shows the commands and register settings controls, you should be able to take advantage of all the options on offer.

Remove the new modem from your system. Now power up and remove all modems from the Modems applet in Control Panel. Shut down the computer and turn it off. Reinstall the new modem and power up your system again. Windows should now recognise the modem, although you might have to specify a different driver for it using the Have Disk option during the Modem Wizard procedure.

Although AOL uses the .Art format to speed up downloads, it can only do so by reducing image quality. You can disable use of .Art images and get normal Gif or JPEG files by changing a setting in the AOL WWW preferences. Go to My AOL, Preferences, WWW, click on the Web Graphics tab and then uncheck 'Use compressed graphics'.

If you double-click on the art file from within Windows Explorer or My Computer, it should open in Internet Explorer. While .Art file format originally only applied to the customised AOL versions, I noticed when downloading Microsoft's standard Intemet Explorer 5.01 that AOL .Art file support is now offered as an option. If clicking on the file does not work, you might have to open IE and then open the file. When the image is displayed, right-click on it and choose 'save picture as', and then go to 'save as type' and click on the drop down list arrow. You should be able to choose at least bitmap (.bmp) which, although bulky, can at least be read by standard graphics packages.

My tests using PC Direct (which uses a geosynchronous satellite with a relatively high orbit) have been very disappointing. Although file download speed is great, there is a very long latency (or delay) as data travels up to the satellite and then back to you. That produces a very noticeable delay before a Web page first starts to appear. Then the text appears instantly, but this is followed by another long delay before the graphics start to appear. In addition, because of the limited number of satellite channels available, data transfer tends to be fast on new accounts, then slows down as the channel fills up with customers. Taking the two factors together, accessing frequently updated Web material may be significantly slower than a 56K (or even 28K) modem.

The satellite does allow you to download constantly broadcast material, like newsgroup feeds, so if you leave your computer on all night, you will have all the messages in Your favourite newsgroups. Of course there are plenty of offline newsgroup readers that will do that for you anyway. Note, though, that this option forces your computer to download all of the broadcast feed, and only after decoding it and writing it to the hard disk can it determine which items you asked for. So, even with a busmastering PCI card, it imposes quite a heavy load on the computer.

Beware, this system won't suit most users. Look for a cable TV company in your area that has broadband Internet access, or wait for BT to start offering DSL service at sensible prices

Feng Shui consulting to make sure people's homepages are laid out harmoniously.

Internet clock - access the exact time from your PC, wherever you are.

An e-mail worm that encrypts everyone's hard disk unless they send me a cheque for £5.

For the really killer ideas, send me £9.99 for a copy of my book(let) How to Make Money on the Internet by Telling People How to Make Money on the Internet.

I'm not necessarily saying that you were using your Geocities account to run your own little record store but the fact that you have resorted to such a flimsy cover story in your e-mail to me does suggest that there is more to this than meets the eye. I can certainly see how Geocities sysadmins could mistake a zipped catalogue of this kind for a commercial venture. At the very least, the scanned cover art would be a breach of copyright if you didn't have the record labels' permission. Geocities wouldn't discuss your individual case with me but it did draw my attention to the terms of service that you agreed to when you signed up in the first place

<FORM ACTION ="http://search.freefind.com/find.html" METHOD="GET" target="_top">

The last bit tells the browser to plonk the search results in a full window, overriding any frames that might be in place. To preserve the frame structure, you need to change "_top" to whatever name you have assigned to the frame using the frameset tag. In your case it would be target="three".