InBox highlights

Welcome to InBox, where we attempt to answer your internet questions.

Stuart Armstrong is bewildered by the choice of image formats offered by his scanners. "When I click on Save As, I am faced with Jpeg, Gif, Png, Bitmap, Tiff, etc in the drop-down list. What are the pros and cons of all the options?"

You will find a detailed explanation of these formats at www.scantips.com, but here's a brief rundown. Choose Png, Tiff or Bitmap to store master copies of images. These formats maintain the best picture quality but they also take up a lot of disk space. Jpegs are compressed files that take up far less space at the expense of losing some image quality. Choose the Jpeg format at a quality setting of 75 or 80 per cent to send a photo by e-mail or for use on a web page. Gif files are limited to 256 colours and are usually used for small website graphics or logos only.

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Bert Grace says he has faced a disaster since upgrading to Napster Beta 8. "Each time I download a new song and play it back it sounds as though Donald Duck has died and gone to karaoke heaven. Even my personal library that I'd built up is affected in the same way, as if you're playing a 33 rpm at 45 rpm speed."

That is a disaster. If you are using Napster's internal player, try downloading an alternative player such as Winamp. If the songs still sound bad played through Winamp, right-click on the main window and check that the audio settings are as recommended in Options/Preferences/Audio IO/Configure. If you are already using a non-Napster player you might have to re-install it.

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Stuart Kaye writes: "When I used Compuserve, I could choose mail from my mailbox that I wished to download, and discard the rest. Is there a feature in Outlook Express that allows me to choose which messages to download?"

Simple. In OE click Tools/Message Rules/Mail Rules/New. In box 1, check For all messages. In box 2, check Do not download. You should now be able to select e-mails to download manually.

* More of your InBox questions will be answered Wednesday in CyberLunch, on air 12:00-1:00 with Murray Lindsay and Peter Sinclair on Classic Hits 97FM.

If there's anything you want to know about the exciting world of the web, just e-mail inbox@herald.co.nz.

Links:

www.scantips.com

www.winamp.com