1.  Maybe you really don’t want to!  While the email messages themselves are rarely dangerous, attachments are where viruses often lurk.  Files with the extension .exe (see below for an explanation of “extension”) are so potentially dangerous that many email systems won’t even allow them to be transmitted as attachments.  You should never open any attachment without a quick moment of suspicion - were you expecting this message, and is it from a trusted source?

We take photos for our own satisfaction and also for the enjoyment of sharing them with others, and both of these are realms where digital photography can excel:  an organized filing system can make your memories far more accessible than the old piles of shoeboxes ever did, and a few clicks of your mouse can easily replace the expense and delay of reprinting and mailing prints and negatives.

Picasa Web, from our friends at Google, should be your go-to assistant for sharing your digital photos.  We’ve mentioned it briefly in the past in our columns, but we think that it deserves a closer look at this time of year.  The instructions at the website are easy to follow, but there are a few special features we’d like to emphasize:

Just a short time ago it was your pride and joy, and it cost such a fortune that you hid the credit card statement from your spouse.  This was “The last computer I’m ever going to have to buy,” because it was so much more powerful than you predicted you would ever need.  Now it’s a different story; it seems to take forever for programs to load, and browsing the web or even your hard drive is an exercise in patience or frustration, depending on how urgently you need the information.  Something is noisy in there, and that rattle might mean the hard drive is about to quit.   Maybe it’s time for a replacement after all.

We certainly hope you’re not reading this column looking for an answer to the question in the headline.  Despite that fact that we at Compu-Home are famous (or infamous) for being highly opinionated, this is one area where we can only lay out some facts for you and then dump the decision back into your lap. . .  but we hope that those facts will be helpful.