All of your Hardware runs with Drivers. You can find out model information and a lot more about them from "Control Panel". From your START button find SETTINGS, click on that then CONTOL PANEL. Once in CONTROL PANEL scroll down to SYSTEM and double click. The first window will give you information on maker of Puter and Processor plus how much Memory you have installed and version of Windows you have.

Next click on DEVICE MANAGER tab. You will see a listing of DEVICES in your Puter. By clicking + beside each item you can see what you need to find out what product is. You don't need to open SYSTEM DEVICES unless you are just curious. Now you get to play detective. Go get em, Columbo!

In most cases you can just do a search for manufacturer and go straight to their site. Drivers will usually be found under SUPPORT and should have download and installation instructions. You should check for updates at least every 6 to 8 weeks if not more often. Software updates are not as hard. Most of programs have a link in Help menu to go to their site and some even have an update link.

But before you start updating 3rd party software (Not Microsoft), you should get latest updates for your version of Windows. Hey, guess what? Gates made this one easy!

Click on START button then go up near top of column and you will see Windows Update. Sheer genius! Just click it. You will have to be connected to Internet first. When browser opens just click on Products Updates and your Puter will be searched for what needs to be updated. From there it is only a matter of following pretty simple instructions (simple? from Microsoft?). It really is pretty easy to do.

One more little thing before I leave you with all this confusion. I use a program for all my Software that isn't Microsoft from ZDNet called, you guessed it, Updates. http://updates.cnet.com There is a small download and then it will search your hard ' drive and give you a report of all available updates for your software then option to download updates. Best of all it is FREE! Subscribe, download program, get your updates and they will e-mail you a reminder to keep up with them.

Your life will be a lot easier and maybe you won't see so many of "The Blue Screen of Death" or "You have performed an ILLEGAL OPERATION, program will be shut down!" Cause ya didn't. It ain't your fault.

Original bmp file .. appx 20mb jpg compression 2: 217kb jpg compression 15: 79kb jpg compression 30: 51kb ..reccommended jpg comression 50: 36kb ..reccommended jpg compression 150: 20kb.

Even 20kb version was adequate for pictures say up to 5 by 3 inches on an 800 by 600 pixel screen resolution. 30 to 60kb seems a good trade off between file size and quality, but file size you get relates to picture composition. This would seem a good range for 'average' sized jpg web pictures without noticably losing quality.

----------------------------- 4. jpg versus gif gifs are good for icons and small pics - these can be in 16 colours which makes very small files.

jpeg is a compression facility and does not do so well with 16 colour or small pics, unless compression number is increased. jpeg is really for compressing big pictures, lots of data, 24 bit colour.

With gif you do not get options for palette selection and compression levels that jpeg gives.

I use gifs for icons and small pics, jpeg for rest. ------------------------------

5.Black and white. For texts, scan textual material in B&W even if there are colour pics on page. Separately scan colour pics, in colour. Black and white is 1 bit not 8 bit - file sizes are much smaller than equivalent in colour.

I have received text scans in colour - usually black is grey rather than black. If 'ocr' software won't scan them because resolution is too low (and it usually is!), I do next best thing and convert pic to B&W. The process usually involves darkening colour image as much as possible, to increase blackness of characters.

Then convert to black and white using 'threshhold' control. This threshhold is just point at which analyser decides it is a 'black' pixel square, not 'white'.

The threshhold range is 0 t0 255, in range from 127 to 220 does trick, dependent on colour original, and allowable extra black 'dots' you get if value is set too high.

File sizes can reduce a text page from 100kb jpg to 20kb gif, just by going to b&w. Somehow I prefer gifs for black and white - I feel gifs are better suited to simpler jobs than jpeg.

Paul Hailey, hailey@clara.net and site http://www.hailey,clara.net