· Pegasus has launched its severest bid to regain dominance in the accounting-systems market to date. It's offering companies with fewer than 20 employees £399 worth of accounting software completely free of charge. The software is the company's Capital range, and will go to the first 5,000 employers to apply by going to pegasus.co.uk and joining the online community. The company says it wants to stimulate a community and get businesses offering hints and expertise to each other. The software includes purchase, sale and nominal ledgers, invoicing, cashbook and stock control. It also integrates with Microsoft Excel and other key applications, and prints cheques automatically; this is the fully featured programme, not a cut-down version. The move will inevitably be seen as a move against market leader Sage, whose top position has been in little doubt for the best part of a decade, but the offer of free software in this way is likely to appeal to many.

· Business people need to get lives. OK, that's not exactly what a new survey from business communications company Equisys says but it might as well. Apparently a fifth of business managers take items including laptop computers with them on holiday so that they don't miss any emails, inevitably including business mails. Some holidaymakers admitted to spending half a day of their holiday reading mail; 50% relied on local ISPs and internet cafes to get hooked up. Equisys is using the research to push its filtering software so at least people won't get swamped with junk mail; presumably sellers of dictionaries should do OK when a business owner's partner insists that he or she should go and look up the word "holiday" and find the bit where it mentions taking the laptop along.

· Sick computer? Try giving it some fresh air. The apparently frivolous advice comes from service company ServiceTec, which has found that many computing problems can be overcome by increasing the ventilation around the systems during hot-weather periods. The company worked this out by looking at the most common problems coming in to its helpdesk, and found the following errors among the most common difficulties: power cords not being plugged in properly, printers without any paper, printer toner cartridges with the plastic seal still in place, people with fingers on keyboards while they were starting up, people not turning on their monitors and wondering why they couldn't see anything and the oldest chestnut - spilling drinks on keyboards.

· Sole traders and mobile managers will be interested to hear of the Personal Assistant service being launched by T-Mobile and AlldayPA. Charged on a per-use basis, it offers people a website of their own, unlimited internet addresses, letter typing, diary management, text messages and other services. The idea is to present an image of a larger business to clients who care about the size rather than reliability of their suppliers.

· Web designers wanting to put forms on to their sites will welcome Noetica's noeticacr.com, which includes guidance on its form-building product. The idea is to build self-service applications so visitors to websites can service their own queries and related issues with comparative ease. Creating this sort of online form has traditionally taken months with everything being tailor-written; Noetica believes its software allows people to design their forms within a few days.

· AOL has withdrawn its Websitegarage service for all but the people who use its own AOL Hometown. The system has offered free web counters, tune-up services for websites and low-cost search engine submission services for a number of years. The company, which folded the service into its Netscape brand last year, has now written to all customers asking that they remove any code from non-AOL pages as they will stop working on August 15.

· Changes are afoot at ISP Nextra - which owns the Cix online community, essentially a set of moderated newsgroups, called conferences, with an offline front end. First Nextra, which acquired the business last year, is rebranding itself as Telenor to reflect its parent company's name. Second, development of the conferencing service is moving back to directors of the former Cix, who have formed a company called Parkglobe and will be developing the software through which the conferences are accessed further. The software is called Ameol, and is downloadable from ameol.co.uk

· Useful websites we have come across this month: ebusinessclubs.co.uk - a free-to-join group of small businesses under the auspices of UK online for business, Lloyds TSB, BT and other interested parties. They run regional seminars on how to make the best of electronic trading with a variety of speakers. Also: glasshouse.net - a group of entrepreneurs and business managers offering seminars, support and networking opportunities, expanding internationally and attracting high-calibre speakers in the UK.