'Pump-dump' schemes elude filters

Reader mail has clogged the box along with pitches for herbal Viagra. Let's get to the story.

Question: What's with all of the stock pitches in my e-mail? Even my spam filters won't stop them.

Answer: This is what's called a "pump and dump" scheme. Those behind such schemes have control of thousands of "zombie" computers (usually home PCs with high-speed connections and no firewall) and buy a bunch of penny stock. Then they send out these pitches by the millions using their zombie networks and hype worthless stock. Enough people buy it, believe it or not, to make the stock leap for a very short time. The pumpers sell their position and the stock drops like a stone. These things are hard to catch because the stock tip is usually buried in a graphic file that spam filters can't read or included with a bunch of realistic text designed to throw off the spam filter.

Question: I have a new laptop, but I am barely getting an hour of battery life from it before I get a warning on the screen and I have to power it off. Is that normal? What can I do to get better battery life?

Answer: If you bought a low-end PC, you probably got a low-end battery. You can shop around and upgrade to a longer-life battery for less than $100. Secondly, you can reduce the brightness of your LCD screen when you're running on battery. That will sharply lengthen the amount of time your laptop will run on battery power. On a Dell, you just hold down the Function Key (marked "FN" in blue) and hold the key marked with a sun symbol with a down arrow until it is as dark as you can stand. To increase brightness, you hold down Function Key again and hit the sun symbol that has the up arrow. (Other brands will do this differently; check the user's manual.)

Lastly, you can enter the Windows control panel and look in the power section and see that your laptop is set for maximum battery. That will spin down your hard drive and such at short intervals.

Question: A friend told me I could fry my laptop if I put it down flat on the bed while it is running.

Answer: I have in our shop laptops that people had put down on carpets, beds and whatever, and covered up the fans. They overheated and died a horrible, burnt death. When I lay down my running laptops, even my Apple (which has no fan on the bottom), I lay it sideways.

Question: What is the best free e-mail account to avoid spam?

Answer: The "best" word is a tough one. I have used free accounts with all of the big providers at one time or another, and probably my current favorite is Google. Its "gmail" service offers a ton of storage (1 gig of free storage is a lot) and a good spam filter. Yahoo has gotten much better lately at filtering spam as well. The key with a free account is picking a non-obvious user name. That way, the spammers that use the dictionary programs to send spam won't tend to get your e-mail address if your user name is a series of random characters.

WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Ever wish you could vote on what news was on the front page? Now you can with Digg (www.digg.com).

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James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair company, and a computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com.