Most of us can't live without email or web these days. But what happens if you're going somewhere that doesn't have an internet connection? Fear not, we've got some handy hints that will ensure that you can still read emails and surf, you just have to plan ahead.

The web has become a staple in our everyday lives. But what happens when you go somewhere that doesn't have an internet connection, such as a plane for example?

If you're about to hyperventilate at the thought of a few hours without email or web browsing, fear not. You can still partake in these online activities, you just need to be prepared ahead of time.

Email

You obviously can't send or receive email without an internet connection. But you can read messages you've already received and compose replies and new messages; those last two will simply wait patiently until you're online again.

Before you leave

If you use just one PC for email, and if you access all your accounts using POP, your incoming messages are automatically downloaded to your computer. If you set your email client to skip or partially retrieve large messages, you should change that before you go offline.

If you have one or more IMAP accounts, your email client is still likely to download local copies of your messages - but you should check a few settings to be sure. If you adjust your mail client's settings, your email will automatically sync your server-based mail folders with their local counterparts. Still, it doesn't hurt to check your email manually one last time just before leaving.

Google Gears for Gmail

If you use Google's Gmail and prefer to access your email using a web browser rather than a stand-alone email client, you can still get offline access to your saved mail and queue new messages to be sent later. You must first install Google Gears, which lets you work with Google apps offline.

Once you've downloaded Google Gears follow the instructions to install it. Then, log in to your Gmail account, click on the Settings link at the top of the page, and click on the Labs link. Look for the Offline option, select its Enable button, and then click on Save Changes. Now click on the Offline link at the top of the window. Click on Next to confirm you want to install offline access. If you want an optional shortcut, click on Yes.

Now wait while your mail synchs; this can take several minutes. Depending on the volume of mail you store, Gmail may download only a portion of it. When the synch is finished, you can safely go offline.

On the road

Your email client will automatically know that you're offline, allowing you to continue working with messages you've downloaded and queuing any outgoing messages for later delivery. Although it may slow down for a while trying (and failing) to connect to your mail servers. Other than that, you can work normally, including filing and moving email messages.

If you use Gmail's Offline feature, you can either double-click on the Desktop shortcut (if you created one) or simply enter 'http://mail.google.com/' in your browser's address field. You can browse any of the messages that Gmail stored locally, and any new messages you create will be sent when you connect to the internet again and load the Gmail page.

When you return

Once you've reconnected to the internet, your email client should automatically send any messages in your outbox, download new messages, and change the locations on the server of any messages that you've relocated locally. Everything should sync automatically within a few minutes; if you still have messages waiting to be sent after 10 minutes, quit the program and reopen it.

Web browsing

If all you need is information from a finite selection of web pages, you can package up their content and take it with you to read, even when you lack internet access.

Before you leave

The trick to browsing the web offline is to save all the pages you might need, in an appropriate format, before you lose internet access.

Safari lets you save a web page - including graphics, style sheets, and other related files - in a 'web archive'. To save an archive in Safari, simply choose File and Save As. In the Format pop-up menu at the bottom of the Save dialog, make sure ‘Web Archive' is selected. Select a name and a location to save the archive, and click on Save. That's it.

Firefox can do much the same thing with the help of extensions. Once you install the free ScrapBook extension, you can save a page by choosing ScrapBook and then Capture Page. The free Breadcrumbs extension is even simpler: You merely browse to the pages you want to save; Breadcrumbs will save a copy of each one, which you can search for later.

Apple Safari 4.0 review

Mozilla Firefox 3.1 beta 2 review

If you'll need more than a few pages from a site but don't want to archive them individually, you must use more powerful tools. Numerous programs - including the free Getleft, SiteSucker, which requires a donation, and Web Devil, $35 (£25) - can crawl an entire web site and save it as a set of files on your hard disk. In SiteSucker, enter a URL to start from, and the programme traverses the links on that page to the level you set, downloading all the files to your disk.

These web crawlers can take a long time to do their work, so start early. And be sure to read the instructions so you can reasonably limit the depth and breadth of what gets downloaded. (Trying to download the entirety of, say the BBC website would take eons and fill up your hard disk.)


On the Road

If you've saved web archives in Safari, you can view them by double-clicking one of the archive files in the Finder. Safari opens it and displays something that looks and works just like the original (except for any server-based components such as database access).

The same goes for any of the web crawlers - simply open the top-level HTML file for a given site (usually called index.html) in your favorite browser, and then navigate the site as you normally would.

In Firefox, if you used the ScrapBook extension, view saved pages by choosing a page name from the ScrapBook menu. To search for a page saved using the Breadcrumbs extension, choose Breadcrumbs from the pop-up menu to the left of the search field in the Firefox toolbar and search for a word from any previously visited page.

source: www.pcadvisor.co.uk

Symantec is warning Web users that searching for information on computer viruses such as Conficker could put them at risk of unintentionally downloading the virus on to their PC.

Conficker targets a flaw in Windows Server and despite Microsoft releasing an emergency patch and urging all Web users to download it, many machines remain unprotected.


According to the security vendor, searching for 'conficker' in a number of the Web's most popular search engines brings up a number of hoax Websites that actually host the virus and infect any users that navigate to the site.

Symantec warns Web users the best course of action is to use software that will block Web pages such as these from being visited.

"Be careful with the links you follow. A sincere effort of keeping abreast with the latest security information might contain some unwelcome surprises," the security firm added.

A third version of the virus was also discovered this month and security researchers believe it may cause problems on April Fools Day.

"It's set to go off April 1, 2009 and Conficker will generate 50,000 URLS daily," said Computer Associates director of threat research, Don DeBolt.

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Macworld

f Microsoft had invented the iPod, it would have been called the Microsoft I-pod Pro 2005 Human Ear Professional Edition. The cult-hit video that makes that assertion may have been a joke, but it rings true. And when word emerged that the video was a self-parody produced within Microsoft, the point was even clearer: The world's largest software developer just isn't very good at naming stuff.

Some Microsoft names sound clunky; some are confusing; some are undignified or overambitious. More than any other company in technology, the Redmond powerhouse loves to change product names--often replacing one lackluster label with an equally uninspired one. Microsoft has also been known to mess up some names that are actually perfectly good, such as Windows and Word, by needlessly tampering with them.

Herewith, in chronological order, are ten Microsoft names that could have been a lot better, together with some semiconstructive advice on monikers that would have more euphonious and/or more accurate. I also selected six not-quite-as-bad runners-up.

1993: Word 6.0 for Windows: When Microsoft upgraded 1991's popular Word 2.0 for Windows, it replaced it with...no, not something logical like Word 3.0. Rather, it blithely hopscotched over three version numbers and landed at Word 6.0. The official explanation for the skippage was that it brought the Windows edition's version number into line with that of the older DOS incarnation of Word. But conspiracy theorists noted that it also allowed Word to catch up with archrival WordPerfect, which also released a version 6.0 in 1993.

Whatever the rationale, the move rendered the practical purpose of version numbers meaningless, thereby setting a bad example for other companies such as Netscape, which later went straight from Netscape Navigator 4.0 to version 6.0.

What it should have been called: Word 3.0 for Windows. Simple and accurate.

1995: Microsoft Bob. When I asked my Twitter and Facebook pals to nominate bad Microsoft names, this legendarily lousy Windows front-end hosted by animated characters came up far more often than any other product. It's possible that the badness of the product has tarnished its title. But as several people pointed out, "Microsoft Bob" is both cutesy-cute and uninformative--it doesn't give you an inkling as to what the product is all about. (The box featured a smiley face wearing Bill Gates-like nerdy glasses, but the main character in the interface was a dog named Rover, who was later revived for Windows XP's misbegotten search feature.)

What it should have been called: Well, Microsoft Rover would have been at least slightly more descriptive--especially since the product itself was such a dog.

1996-present: Every name ever associated with handheld devices running Microsoft software. At first, they were called Handheld PCs, and ran an OS known as Windows CE. Then they morphed into Palm PCs--until the PalmPilot people complained, whereupon they became Palm-Size PCs. But only briefly: Soon, Microsoft wanted us to call them Pocket PCs, and the software they ran was renamed Windows Mobile.

That name stuck around when the OS migrated from PDAs to phones, although it bifurcated into two editions: Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Windows Mobile Smartphone. Then Microsoft declared that there were three Windows Mobile variants--Windows Mobile Classic, Windows Mobile Professional, and Windows Mobile Standard. As for the devices themselves, Steve Ballmer declared in February of this year that they'd be known henceforth as Windows Phones--scratch the "Mobile." Except for the fact that the OS is still Windows Mobile. Got that?

What they should have been called: Melvin. Or just about anything else, really, as long as it didn't keep changing.

2000: .NET. In the mid-1990s, critics accused Microsoft was accused by many of being slow to jump on the Internet bandwagon. By the dawn of the new millennium, however, it was firmly on board--and in June 2000, it unveiled a vision for online services it called .NET. As originally articulated, .NET addressed consumers, businesses, and developers, and it involved everything from programming languages to an online version of Microsoft Office to calendaring and communications services to a small-business portal to stuff for PDAs, cell phones, and gaming consoles. It was so wildly ambitious, so all-encompassing, and so buzzword-laden that it pretty much defied comprehension, at least if you weren't a professional geek. Which the company seemed to realize--it quickly stopped pushing the concept to consumers, instead restricting it to programming tools.

What it should have been called: How about "Virtually Everything Microsoft Does Involving the Internet From This Day Forward," or VEMDIFTDF for short? Or taking a different tack, what if Microsoft had simply declared that it was now Web-centric, period--no new branding required?

2000: Windows Millennium Edition. Microsoft couldn't call this successor to Windows 98 "Windows 2000" because it had already assigned that name to Windows NT's replacement. So the company saddled the OS with a name that was both pretentious and goofy, and gave it the overly adorable (and badly capitalized) nickname "Windows Me." It was probably bad juju: The product itself went on to be widely reviled as slow, glitchy, and insubstantial; and to this day its name rivals that of Microsoft Bob as shorthand for "crummy software."

What it should have been called: Windows 2001, especially if Microsoft marketing had assembled an ad campaign involving HAL 9000 and/or apes hurling things at an obelisk. Bonus virtue: That name would have given Microsoft an excuse to delay the OS for six months to fix bugs.

2001: HailStorm. Hail isn't exactly a form of weather resplendent with positive associations: It kills crops, damages cars, blinds drivers, and is downright painful--and occasionally deadly--to people unfortunate enough to get pelted by it. Yet that's the codename that Microsoft chose to associate with the plans it unveiled in 2001 to deliver an array of Web services and to store consumers' personal information for use with Microsoft and third-party offerings.

The notion of Microsoft controlling so much private data proved instantly controversial; the company changed HailStorm's name to .NET My Services, and then put the whole idea on hold And yet HailStorm wasn't so different from services that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and others offer today. I can't help wondering whether it would have fared better if it hadn't had a name that suggested a violent weather disturbance descending from the heavens to afflict us mere mortals.

What it should have been called: Microsoft Passport--a name Microsoft gave its online ID service even before it announced HailStorm--wouldn't have been bad. Today, however, Microsoft Passports are known as Windows Live IDs (presumably to distinguish them from all those Windows IDs that have died).

2004: Windows Genuine Advantage. Understandably, Microsoft hates it when people pirate Windows. So it added multiple copy-protection measures such as activation and validation to Windows XP and Windows Vista. Collectively, they're known as Windows Genuine Advantage, which the company touts as a benefit to properly licensed users. But WGA asks paying Microsoft customers to jump through piracy-detecting hoops. Worse, it's been known to accuse them of stealing Windows and shut off functionality.

What it should have been called: Snarky answer: Windows Genuine Disadvantage. Serious one: Windows Anti-Piracy Technology.

2004: PlaysForSure. This logo program for services and devices that used Windows Media DRM may have been the single most inaccurately named item in the history of personal technology. The name exuded hubris, but PlaysForSure tracks often FailedToPlay on PlaysForSure-enabled devices--and, of course, they didn't play at all on the world's most popular MP3 player, arch-rival Apple's iPod. For Pete's sake, they didn't even play on Microsoft's own music player when it appeared. By the time Microsoft shut down the PlaysForSure-powered MSN Music service, it had already rolled PlaysForSure into the blandly named Certified for Windows Vista program, which doesn't promise much of anything.

What it should have been called: MusicCripplingWindowsMediaDRM. Or just plain Windows Media, which is what PlaysForSure was beneath the patina of marketing hype.

2006: 2007 Microsoft Office System. When Microsoft announced Microsoft Office 2007 in February 2006, it started calling the overall Office platform the "2007 Microsoft Office System," even though individual versions, such as the alarmingly wordy Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, kept the year at the end of the name. At the time, a Microsoft representative explained the distinction to me, but I barely comprehended it even then--it was as if the company wanted Windows 95 to be called 95 Windows in certain instances. Then there was the superfluous "system" on the end, which reminds me of how the Disney company insists on calling Disneyland the "Disneyland Resort."

What it should have been called: Microsoft Office 2007. Actually, that's what everybody outside the city limits of Redmond does call it.

2008: Windows Live Essentials: In September 2008, Microsoft announced that it was stripping three of Windows Vista's applets--Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery, and Windows Movie Maker--out of Windows 7. They would live on, but as free downloads, known collectively (along with other apps such as Windows Live Writer) as Windows Live Essentials. But doesn't the fact that Microsoft unbundled these tools from Windows prove that they're not essential? Bonus annoyance: Microsoft's decision to identify these downloadable freebies' under the Windows Live rubric (which usually applies to Web services) makes it even harder to define just what Windows Live means.

What it should have been called: I'm not sure that anyone gains anything by giving these applets a collective name. But something along the lines of Windows Bonus Material or Windows Extras would work.

Runners Up: Six More Unfortunate Microsoft Names

Chkdsk. Even in the DOS era, it was unclear why the name of this venerable disk-checking utility skipped all its vowels; even with the eight-character filename limit it could have at least been Checkdsk or Chekdisk. Today, there's no excuse for not calling it CheckDisk.

All Microsoft products called Messenger. Not that it's inherently bad name. But there's Windows XP's Windows Messenger; there's the unrelated command-line utility called Windows Messenger Service, famous mostly for being a security leak; and there's the old MSN Messenger, which was renamed Windows Live Messenger in 2005. That's at least two Messengers too many. To its credit, though, Microsoft didn't change "Messenger" to "Message Explorer."

Microsoft Office Word. And Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, and Microsoft Office Access. With Office 2007, Microsoft stuck in a superfluous "Office" in the middle of some of the best-known names in the history of software. Nobody noticed. Basic rule of thumb: If your customers don't realize that you've changed your product's name, you've failed.

OneNote. Merriam-Webster reports that "one-note" means "monotonous." Microsoft's handy note-taking application deserves better.

The Road Ahead. Published in 1995, Bill Gates's best-selling book famously didn't predict the rise of the Internet, thereby utterly failing to live up to the visionary promise of its title.

Windows 95: Yes, seriously: By the time it finally shipped, 1995 was two-thirds of the way over, leaving the blockbuster new version of Windows sounding slightly stale from the get-go. And it ushered in the era of consistently inconsistent Windows names, from additional year-based ones (Windows 98, 2000), to inappropriately highfalutin' modifiers (Windows Millennium Edition, Windows Vista) to mysterious acronyms (Windows XP).

Are there other tech-product names you find annoying and/or inaccurate--from Microsoft or from other companies? Or maybe even names you think are really good? Sound off in the comments.

When you're strapped for cash for a can't-avoid-it purchase, sometimes it's worth sacrificing a few frills. We zeroed in on a desktop, a laptop, a color laser printer, a camera, and an HDTV. Each represents a great value in its category.

1. Desktop PC: Dell Inspiron 518 ($654)

Need solid performance for everyday tasks in a budget PC? Dell's Inspiron 518 sports a 2.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU, 3GB of PC6400 DDR2 memory, and a 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 hard drive (7200 rpm, 16MB cache). The Inspiron 518 turned in a respectable score of 108 on our WorldBench 6 tests, and while hard-core gamers might hold out for more graphics oomph than the unit's ATI Radeon HD3450 provides, the system sports some nice design touches such as a recessed storage tray on top of the system with two easily accessible USB ports (in addition to two on the face of the unit). We also liked the bundled 20-inch wide-screen LCD monitor with a built-in Webcam. For under $700 (in early February), this sounds like a good value to us.

2.Netbook: Acer Aspire One ($350)

Looking for a budget netbook? The Acer Aspire One could fit the bill. It's not perfect--you might consider splurging for the six-cell battery, since the included three-cell battery will barely last 2 hours, and the 8.9-inch screen is undeniably tiny. But it's got a great usable keyboard and a reasonably roomy 120GB hard disk drive, and the $350 base price makes it a solid candidate to tide you over until a future crop of this fast-evolving class of portables comes along later this year.

3.Multifunction Ink Jet Printer: Canon Pixma MP620 ($150)

You'll be hard-pressed to find a multifunction color inkjet that strikes as good a balance between cost (about $150, list, in February) and quality as the Canon Pixma MP620. With support for USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi connections; media slots for most common storage cards; and two 150-sheet input trays, it's ready to meet the needs of most small offices and homes. Image, scan, and copy quality is generally solid, and the cost of consumables (4.6 cents for a page of plain black text and 12.4 cents for a full-color page) is about or slightly better than average.

4.Camera: Pentax Optio A40 (under $200)

With all the new camera announcements at the recent Consumer Electronics Show--as well as all the ones coming up at the PMA imaging show in March--it's a great time to buy one of last year's top-of-the-line point-and-shoots at bargain-bin prices. We like the Pentax Optio A40, a 12-megapixel pocket camera that delivers very good image quality (according to our tests) and has optical image stabilization and a DivX movie mode. The Optio A40 cost about $250 when it was released last year, but by this February it was selling for as little as $120.

5.HDTV: Vizio SV420XVT 42-Inch LCD TV ($999)

With good overall image quality and a 120-Hz refresh rate for smoother motion, the Vizio SV420XVT also has a fair price for a 42-inch LCD-TV: under $1000 as of early February. It isn't the easiest TV to set up, but if you're looking for a great HDTV picture at a good price, this Vizio has the goods.

Power-Hog will not end global warming, but it does make an attempt at familiarizing kids with the cost of running energy using devices, like video games and computers. It takes loose change (or allowance) and a red light blinks when time is running out. Plenty of people, presumably parents, think Power-Hog is a great idea for metering energy use. Still, it seems more like a novel parenting tool than a product that will genuinely benefit the green movement.

The Laundry Pod is essentially a large salad spinner for the clothes you need to wash, but don’t want to waste energy on in your main clothes washing machine. This hand powered washing machine has simple instructions and might even give you an arm workout as you pump the hand lever to activate the wash cycle. Where it might not save you time, the Laundry Pod will save you money and trips to the coin laundry--that is if all you need to wash is socks.

The Riti Printer solves the problem of costly ink cartridges, the difficulty to replace them, and finally gives you something to do with coffee and tea dregs. This clever printer is completely powered by the user moving the ink cartridge--packed with breakfast recyclables--by hand, from left to right until the paper has moved through the printer. This small printer is probably best for printing things like a letter to Aunt Trudy in Nebraska, not important business documents, but it is still an idea to be admired. Could be dangerous to use after six expressos, however.