How to shrink photos for e-mailing

Q: Great suggestion in your recent column to shrink pictures to make them easier to e-mail. But … how does one shrink photos?

RICK WOODWARD

A: Your digital camera probably came with editing software. In it, look for a menu item with a name such as resize and go from there. If you use Windows Vista, click on a photo to open a free program that’s included in the operating system. Click on e-mail and your photo will be automatically resized. You’ll get a pull down menu that lets you decide how small is small enough. Around 100 kilobytes is fine. If you have neither Vista nor photo editing software, here’s a link to about 10 free photo editing programs: http://tinyurl.com/2gltnv.

Q: My computer runs slow and nothing speeds it up. I’ve tried anti-spyware and adware programs. I have been told to just delete everything (after backing up files) and start over. My friend said that puts the computer back to the way it was out of the box. Can you tell me how to do this? I assume I go to Control Panel and the Delete Programs option and delete one by one.

DAVE PAVESIC

A: What I think the person was suggesting was saving all your files, reformatting the hard disk and reinstalling Windows, then reinstalling your programs. After that you’d return the files you saved to the hard disk. (You wouldn’t actually delete files one by one. When you reformat the hard disk that process wipes out everything.)

Unless you are an experienced computer user/hobbyist, you’d need to spend some time with some “computing made simple” books before attempting this. Reading a few lines on a Web site wouldn’t be enough. The easy way out may be taking it to a repair service and have them do the backup and reformatting/restoration.

Note from Bill

Readers who followed my recent link to the free version of an anti-adware program Ad-Aware were presented with a sales pitch to buy a “for pay” edition. I asked the company for an explanation. Here’s the reply from spokeswoman Marie Louise:

“The upgrade message in Ad-Aware 2008 leads to the download page on download.com. That page features an offer with a sign-up form, for people interested in getting the Ad-Aware Plus for free through TrialPay. Shortly after entering this screen, a download confirmation dialog will be displayed. It has recently come to our knowledge that this dialog is sometimes blocked by the pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer. When this happens, a bar is displayed, quite subtly, at the top of the window. To display the dialog when this happens, you need to click the ‘click here’ link.

“We can see how users who miss these visual clues — which admittedly are rather subtle, on an otherwise busy page — are led to believe that they need to sign up with TrialPay to get the download. This is not the case, however, and we will look into ways of making this more obvious.”

I will not recommend Ad-Aware again until I’m satisfied there’s a less confusing way to the free product.