Mail out
For security reasons my university has stopped access to Hotmail, and told us that all email should come via the university's email system. But I have been using my Hotmail accounts for my job applications. I know it is possible to forward POP3 accounts to Hotmail, but I want to do the reverse. Tony Alao
tony.alao@ftnetwork.com

Jack Schofield replies:
You can probably still get into Hotmail via an encrypting proxy such as Safeweb without the university knowing. Otherwise your best bet is to switch to Yahoo mail as soon as possible. Sign up for an account, go to the inbox, click Options, and, in the Mail Management column, click POP Access & Forwarding. This will enable you to forward mail to the account of your choice. Yahoo mail offers three times as much storage space (6 megabytes) as Hotmail, and does not attract as much spam. Also, Yahoo has not suffered from the sort of hideous redesign that has ruined Hotmail's user interface and is blighting Microsoft's main websites.

IE logo
How can I remove the BT Internet logo and restore Internet Explorer's animated logo? Yousaf Sani
yousaf_sani@hotmail.com

JS: Microsoft provides an IEAK (Internet Explorer Administration Kit) to make it easy for suppliers to customise IE. Plutosoft provides a free program, IE Fixer, to restore the defaults in IE and Outlook Express. It runs under Windows 9x/Me. You can download it from www.simtel.net/pub/pd/54775.html. If you want to restore the logo manually, you can do it by editing the system registry. Go to Start|Run, type regedit in the box and click OK. Go to the registry settings HKEY_ CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ Toolbar and delete the strings that read BrandBitmap and SmBrandBitmap. Finally, close the editor and restart your PC. This works with Windows 9x/Me and Windows 2000. The registry is a critical part of Windows and it will not work without it. Before editing it, it is a good idea to back it up. Microsoft provides instructions for doing this with Windows 98 at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q256/4/19.ASP

File hunt
I am sure the old Windows File Manager used to display all the folder sizes next to the folder names, just like Explorer displays file sizes next to the names. I want this feature to help clearing the hard drive of large, redundant folders. Phil Kemp
fil@blueyonder.co.uk

JS: If you select a folder, right-click on it and select Properties, Windows Explorer will tell you how much space it is using. However, this is not as useful as a program that shows coloured pie charts of your hard drives and folders, so you can see which ones are taking up too much space. My favourite program for this was Sveiner Rasmussen's DiskState v1.14. This $10 utility has been replaced by the much more powerful but more expensive (£39.95) clean-up utility, DiskState version 2.6.

One alternative is East Tec's $19.95 DiskSpace Explorer 3 Home Edition. But start with the simplest, and freiske option, Silurian's DSpaceChart.

Logo time
How easy is it to put a company logo on to emails? Morgan Hamilton
morgan_1954@yahoo.co.uk

JS: This is not something I would ever do. Plain text email is quick to download and can be read in any email program. Graphics and logos have to be sent as attachments, which take up far more space and take longer to download. However, it is straightforward if your email package supports stationery. Outlook Express includes a "stationery wizard" to help. (Look up "stationery wizard" in the OE help index.) If you create a new message in Rich Text (HTML) format, you can select from a range of stationery by going to the Format menu and choosing Apply Stationery. Preconstructed templates can make it easy to create stationery.

One example is Microsoft's High Impact eMail package, designed for Outlook and Outlook Express. A web search for email stationery templates will find lots of examples.

First page
How do I create my own web page using Windows 98? Alan Rigg
alan.rigg@virgin.net

JS: There are dozens of ways to create web pages, but in essence, you have to create a document where the layout instructions are specified in HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language). This becomes a web page when it is stored on a web server where browsers such as Internet Explorer can read it. For a good account of the process, see How Web Pages Work Most of the sites that offer free space to host web pages also provide templates that make it very easy to create them.

Yahoo's GeoCities is a good place to start. The drawback is that pages made with templates tend to look the same, though you can find different ones (eg www.elated.com/pagekits. ZyWeb is capable of producing good quality sites. You can also create pages in Microsoft Word and similar package that can save files in HTML format.

However, then you have to upload them to the server. If you intend to build a proper web site, you should learn how to use an HTML authoring package. You can download a free one from www.thefreesite.com/Free_Software/HTML_freeware (SiteAid is very good for more experienced users).

You should also be able to download a free copy of Microsoft's FrontPage Express 2.0 from the Internet Authoring section of the Windows Update site. Commercial packages range from cheap and cheerful to very complicated and expensive. Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver are examples. If you get stuck, Webmonkey is useful.