Q: When talking about laptops, what exactly does it mean when one is described as having "a 17-inch diagonal widescreen display?" Is it a rectangular display with a 17-inch length?
A: The measurements in television, computer monitor and laptop specifications typically reflect the distance from one corner of the screen to the diagonally opposite corner.
Cathode-ray tube monitors are sometimes measured differently from the liquid-crystal-display screens found in laptops and flat-panel desktop monitors. CRT monitor measurements can include the casing around the screen, whereas LCD measurements usually reflect just the size of the viewable screen area.
As for the "wide screen" part, computer screens these days are available in different aspect ratios, just like television sets. Standard square-shaped TV sets and computer monitors often use an aspect ratio of 4:3, which means the ratio of the overall width to the height of the screen is 4:3.
TVs and monitors listed as widescreen have a different aspect ratio that indicates the screen's width. The 16:9 ratio is common, although 16:10 and 15:9 are also available, and all are better at displaying wide-screen DVD movies than a 4:3 screen.
Q: When I drag digital pictures into an e-mail message, they come in huge and fill up the screen, making it impossible to see the entire image at once. Can I adjust the size of photos so they fit in the message window?
A: Giant photo syndrome can occur when the resolution of the digital picture exceeds that of the computer monitor. Although the computer's graphics software can sometimes correct the situation and reduce the image's display to fit properly on the screen, this is not always the case.
Digital photographs are made up of pixels — the word is short for "picture elements" — and a pixel is a single point in an image. The total image resolution of a photo taken with a 3-megapixel camera, for example, is about 2,048 by 1,536 pixels — which, when multiplied together, is more than 3-million pixels working together to make up the picture.
Monitor resolution is also measured in pixels, and most monitors these days use screen resolutions of 800 by 600 pixels; 1,024 by 768 pixels; or 1,152 by 864 pixels. All of these resolutions are smaller than a 3-megapixel photo, so when the photo is displayed at its full size, it exceeds the monitor's screen size. But both Windows XP and Mac OS X give you the opportunity to shrink photos to resolutions that fit better on a computer screen, like 640 pixels by 480 pixels.
In Windows XP, click to select the photos you want to send from My Pictures or another location on your computer. After you have selected the pictures, click in the "e-mail selected items" option in the task pane. You can also right-click with the mouse and select "Send to Mail Recipient" from the pop-up menu.
In the resulting box, click the button next to "Make all my pictures smaller" and then on the link for "Show more options" to see a selection of resolutions to use for the picture attachments. Choose one and click OK.
Google's Picasa photo-management program for Windows and Linux (free to download at http://picasa.google.com) can also shrink photo attachments.
Mac OS X users have an option in the iPhoto program to reduce image sizes for e-mail. After you select pictures from your iPhoto library that you want to share, click the e-mail icon at the bottom of the window; a box will pop up asking if you'd like to shrink the image for e-mailing.
Q: I use various browsers in my work. Is there a way to have a central bookmarks repository instead of trying to keep a master on one browser and exporting, then importing, into the other browsers?
A: An on-line bookmark manager program that lets you store your favourite Web addresses on the Web itself may help you keep your links current among all your browsers — and keep your bookmarks safe if your hard drive dies. Because the bookmarks are on-line, you can also get to them from any Internet-connected computer, in the office, at home or at a Parisian cybercafe.
Most Web-based bookmark manager programs work like this: You sign up for an account (often free) and import your existing bookmarks. You usually get a browser toolbar button or menu command from your chosen service to use for adding new bookmarks to your collection. Once you have populated your bookmarks within the on-line service, you can get to your collection from any computer when you log back into the site.
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