Web by CD
A village school in Kenya has a computer but no phone line, so no internet. Can I copy sites to disc and send them by mail? Is it legal? Phil Slade

Jack Schofield replies: You can, but whether it is legal is another matter. Educational establishments and students are generally allowed to get away with many things that would be illegal if ordinary users did them, and the concept of "fair use" (in the US) or "fair dealing" (in the UK) covers a lot of incidental copying. Different websites allow different types of use, and different countries have different rules on fair use. There is a good guide to the UK position in Guidelines for Fair Dealing in an Electronic Environment, published by the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Publishers Association in 1998.

For the situation in the US, see the University of Texas's Fair Use of Copyrighted Materials and Stanford University's Copyright & Fair Use. But from my reading, copying a website on to CD for someone else's use would not seem to constitute fair dealing, and it would be much better if a librarian, in Kenya, created CDs for this purpose. You should look for guidelines on each site or write to the webmaster to ask permission.

Many people do copy websites for offline reading, and Blue Squirrel's Web Whacker is often used in education. Web Whacker 5 is available for Windows, and Web Whacker 4 for the Mac (including old 68020-based systems with Mac OS 7.5). See www.bluesquirrel.com/products/whacker. The same company also sells an Education Edition of Web Whacker and the more powerful Grab-a-Site. Tenmax's Teleport Pro would also be a good program for your purposes. Black Widow is worth a look. For dozens of alternatives, see the Free Download Centre

Messenger pop-ups
I had a warning message and was advised to go to blockmessenger. com where I was told to disable messaging. Should I? Carole Watts

JS: Many people are suffering from pop-up advertising messages that arrive via a low-level messaging service that is part of all NT-based versions of Windows (NT/2000/XP). It has nothing to do with Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger or any other messaging application. Blockmessenger.com's author claims that "the only way to block these spam messages _ required doing extensive tweaking and configuring of my computer," and offers to sell you a blocker for $29.95. This is a bad deal.

You can turn off this messenger service yourself, in one minute. Log on to Windows XP in administrator mode, go to the Control Panel, and open the Administrative Tools folder. Double-click the Services icon, and scroll down the Name column until you get to Messenger. Double-click Messenger to get the Properties sheet (or right-click it and select Properties), and then click the Dependencies tab. The lower box should be empty, which is to say, nothing depends on you running Messenger.

Go back to the General tab and look for the Service Status section. If Messenger is running, click Stop to stop it. Next, go to Startup type and click the down arrow on the right. Clicking the arrow lets you select Manual or Disabled, and you can select either. If Messenger has no dependencies, select Disabled and click OK to finish. You will not get any more Messenger pop-ups.

Clean desk
My desktop is full of stuff I've downloaded, and saved to desktop. Can I save these programs elsewhere? Brian Storer

JS: It is unlikely that any of your programs are actually on the desktop, or are running from the desktop. If the icons have a small arrow on them, they are just shortcuts to the real programs. Any shortcuts you do not want, you can throw in the bin. You will get a message to tell you that this will not uninstall the program. If you have icons that don't have little arrows, they are probably files you have downloaded, such as Zone Alarm.

However, when you double-clicked the download to install it, the program files were extracted and installed somewhere else: in this case, they are probably in C:\Program Files\Zone Labs\ZoneAlarm. You can therefore bin the file you downloaded and expect the program to keep on working, though it is wise to check first. If you want to keep files you have downloaded, you can use the mouse to drag them from the desktop and drop them in a folder, such as My Files, in Windows Explorer. However, it might be better to download these files directly to a folder such as C:\My Downloads and keep them off the desktop altogether.

You can also use Windows Explorer to remove icons and files from the desktop, or vice versa. In Windows 9x/Me, you can move a shortcut file from C:\Windows\Desktop to a folder in C:\Windows\Start Menu, and it will appear on the Start menu. In NT-based versions of Windows, these special folders are stored under C:\Documents and Settings.

In synch
I am looking for an inexpensive piece of back-up software that works with Windows XP. I have been using LapLink to synchronise my desktop with an external drive to back up all my data, but I can't afford to buy the latest version. Geoff Winterman

JS: Second Copy 2000 works with Windows 9x/Me and NT-based versions (NT4/2000/XP). It runs in the background to keep your files backed up to another directory or hard drive, or to another computer on a network. It costs $29.95 from www.centered.com, and a 30-day evaluation copy is available. A free alternative is Anders Petersson's No Hands Backup but it does not run in background mode.

Backchat
· Last week, David Wood wanted to send SMS messages by email, and several readers responded by sending messages to my email. D O'Keeffe used Go2mobile.com, which does "SMS to PC and back". Nigel Shindler says it is "one of the many useful features of Vodafone Mail, which is Vodafone's new email service. It can be accessed directly over the web, via a POP3 client such as Outlook Express, or from a mobile phone. And it is free to Vodafone subscribers". Jason Bailey has used Kapow!, which lets you email ukmobilenumber@kapow.co.uk. Lynda MacNamee says she has tried a few services including ICQ, and thinks the best one is LiquidDrop.com. It lets you send SMS messages by addressing them to the mobile number@LiquidDrop.com, @OnHisMobile.com or @OnHerMobile.com etc. "You get a delivery confirmation when the message is received. Best of all, you get any replies in your email."

· Peter Rowe wanted to convert Microsoft Publisher files into HTML to put them on the web, but was worried about the size of the files. Ian Ford says: "If Publisher can't resolve text and graphic elements, the text will be saved as an image along with the graphic elements. This can lead to large page sizes. By adjusting the layout it may be possible to allow Publisher to resolve the text and graphic elements separately and thus reduce the page size."