Q: I am living in a house which does not have access to a land line phone. How can I connect my mobile to my computer to read my email?

How fast will it be? Are there any other options?

A: If you have a laptop with a wireless connection (like bluetooth or infra-red) and a mobile phone with the same capabilities, it is an easy process. Just press connect on both items and send an email from the laptop once you have established an internet connection. If you are using a mobile phone and a desktop PC, things can be more difficult. It is possible to buy adapters that will plug into some mobile phones to take a normal phone wire and plug your modem into your PC as if it were a land line.

But you would have to dial your internet service provider's number manually. Don't forget there are a lot of reasonablepriced internet cafes that will work out a lot cheaper than connecting from your mobile phone.

Q: I have a PC at work and a Mac at home. What kinds of problems can I expect transferring files between them?

A: Files created by popular applications for both PC and Mac, Word, for example, will work fine. Most files created by Mac software are likely to require conversion to the Windows format.

For text files, try to choose a popular file type, for example .txt (plain text), or .rtf (rich-text format). Most Mac and PC word processors will be able to cope with these. All popular image formats .jpg, .gif, .tiff, .bmp

should work. Web pages will generally have no problems.

Sound and video files will have to be converted by most Macs and, if you have the latest Mac OS X, they may work. You also need to be careful with file names. The maximum length of a filename should not exceed 28 characters on the Mac and transferring a file with a name longer than this will cause the name to be shortened to fit. Mac filenames cannot contain the colon character (:). On windows, names cannot begin with a period (.) or contain slashes (/,\).

You will not be able to access Mac files with incompatible file names on Windows and they can make Explorer crash.

Q: I have found some web sites with foreign languages that need special fonts. How do I get them and install them?

A: It depends on the browser and operating system you are using to view the web page. More recent versions of Internet Explorer on Windows will attempt to download the relevant language pack based on the web page you are viewing. This will include the various fonts you need. If you are using Netscape, you will need to click on the Edit menu, then Preferences, then the Languages menu item underneath the Navigator option. From here, you can add and remove language packs that are supported by the version you have installed.

Malcolm McIlhagga is from software company Sigmer
www.sigmer.com