Everyone loves digital cameras and the ease of operating without film, but storing all the images can be an issue. At home I like to store them on my laptop and back them up to CDs.

If you are going on vacation for a week and plan on taking lots of pictures. You should know how many images you can you store on your laptop?

Most consumer shoot in compressed JPEG mode, and the images are between 250k bytes and perhaps 1.4M bytes. A 1 GB CF will hold as many as a thousand or more images. If you are like me it is easy these days to shoot a lot of pictures in a very short time. You could buy another CF or transfer the images to your laptop.

Laptops do not hold all that much data. How many gigs of disk capacity do you have left on your personal laptop? The newer ones will come with 40 or even 100 GB drives, but most people don’t have ones that new, and many also have a bunch of stuff loaded already. So, check out the size of your HD and see how much space is left for your photos. If your laptop has a CD burner bring extra blank CDs so you can burn the photos. A great little back tool is http://www.secondcopy.com. You could also back them up to your ISPs server.

I recently heard about a way to send large e-mail attachments that will avoid clogging your inbox and causing bounced e-mails. Pando Networks Inc., has developed a program that allows you to distribute very large files, like photos. This is an efficient way to share files without using a website to share your personal videos or photos.

Another option might be to buy a portable hard drive. You can find them the size of good-sized glasses case. You stick your CF in a slot, turn the gadget on, and dump the CF into the gadget’s storage. These range can be found from 20GB to 60GB+ and are $100+.

Stand-alone burners can burn CDs & DVDs, and some will also play DVD movies, audio CDs, etc as well so you can bring your movies and music along while traveling.

If you have a new laptop it might have a fast firewire connection, if not you will need to use the USB connection to transfer the photos.

So, taking a few precautions and planning ahead a little will insure that you get to keep all the photos that you took as a reminder of that wonderful, long ago vacation.

If you are looking for new I would look at the Lenovo (IBM) 3000 V100 and the HP NC2400 that sell for around $1500. These are new laptops that were recently manufactured and are both very light weight, less than four pounds. They have 12.1" displays and decent battery life. The Lenovo is higher performance but the HP has better battery life. The HP has 512 MB RAM, while the IBM 1 GB. If keyboard is important than is always tought to beat IBM since they perfected keyboards many years ago when they were the typwriter kings. The Lenovo uses a touchpad, while the IBM an embedded eraser head mouse. Both are great machines and I don't think you could go wrong with either one.

We are often asked what laptop would be best for my needs. This question really needs to be answered by buyer. It depends upon your needs and what applications you are going to be running on the laptop.

Some general guidelines for the various things people do with their laptop and what hardware is needed follows:

Word Processing requires minimal RAM and HD and CPU. You can't type faster than a Pentium 90 and even an older $200 Pentium 2 laptop is fine for word processing.

E-mail requires the minimal amount of CPU speed, RAM etc. The speed of the connection is more important, but still does not matter much if you are only sending text messages back and forth. Even a 28.8 modem works fine for e-mail.

Web browsing works fine one even a Pentium 2 laptop with 64MB RAM. 128MB is preferred and is fine for most situations. Again the type of connection to the Internet is more important than the hardware. DSL or Cable Modem are far faster than a modem.

Excel requires minimal CPU, RAM and HD unless you are a power Excel user with huge spreadsheets then you might need lots of RAM, a fast CPU and a big Hard Drive.

Music is again does not require much in the way of CPU or processor, but if you have a lot of songs a large Hard Drive (at least 20GB is ok and 40GB is better).

Photography might require both a fast CPU, lots of RAM and lots of Hard Drive Storage. If you are using an intense application to edit the photos and take it very serious look at the software's requirements. If you take thousands of photos then you would need a large Hard Drive (20GB minimum, 40GB preferred). You might even consider and external Hard Drive for extra storage and would want a CDRW to burn the photos.

If you are a gamer, then all bets are off, depending upon which game you play. If you use the latest games then a very fast CPU, a graphics chip and as much as 2GB RAM might be needed.

If you are in doubt about what your applications need then go to the software vendors website and check out the Minimum Systems Requirements. That will show you the needed CPU, RAM, HD space and any other special requirement the specific application might require.

I suggest you buy one that will provide the best possible signal and the most reasonable cost. Manufacturers that make quality products are Netgear, D-Link and Belkin.

I read an article in the June 2006 Computer Shopper that recommended the Netgear WPNT934 RangeMax 240. The list price is around $200 and they seem to be selling on-line for closer to $100. We have been buying Netgear PCMCIA wi-fi cards for several years and have had good success with them. According to the article it was about the fastest routers available, especially at short range.

I search to find a reputable supplier with reasonable prices. You can find a link on our Affiliates Accessories Page if you want to buy one.

The best way to help your kids with porn is to educate them about what it is all about. The onus is on you the parent to communicate with your children. There is no foolproof methods to prevent your children from viewing porn on-line, but one method that can reduce the onslaught is to install a filter on the laptop with special software.

These filters won't allow you to type sex, porn or other sexually related words into a search engine. It also can have the inadvertent effect of stopping legitimate searches.

The programs allow parents many configuration choices that can block porn, gambling and other sites. Filters come with preset lists of Web addresses that they block, to which parents can add sites.

Some programs to consider are:

SafeEyes which includes content control, usage logging, time control and usage alert for Instant Messages, Internet Programs and Websites and costs $50 a year.

Anti-Porn by TuEagles is similar and priced at $39.95.

NetNanny by LookSmart has been around for years and costs $3.50 a month.

Two other ways to detect sleazy sites are services offered by SiteAdvisor and Scandoo. Macafee's Scandoo uses a real-time scanning system to find bad sites while SiteAdvisor maintains a comprehensive database of bad sites. You can learn more about siteadvisor at: . and download it from their website. Scandoo provides a search window from their website, and is free.