Yahoo Answers site is a disaster

More letters from readers this week as students get ready to head back to the books.

Question: On your recommendation, I tried the Yahoo Answers site and was disappointed by the level of the questions and the amount of spam on the site. It seemed like everyone was taking it as a joke.

Answer: Me, too. Right after my column a few weeks ago the site was inundated with people, many of whom have paid no attention to the guidelines. It has turned into a chat room and doesn't come close to rivaling Google Answers. If they ever hire enough moderators, I will let you know. But in the meantime, the site is a disaster.

Question: I am trying to use a graphics program to save my digital photographs, but they are very large, more than 10 megs each. How can I make them smaller so I can e-mail them to people?

Answer: Using your graphics program (if you don't have one, get Picasa from the Google site) you can resize the photograph using the toolbar based RESIZE command and select a smaller size. Save that as a JPG file with a different name. That will leave your original alone and give you a more workable size.

Another option is to store your photos online and just send people a link to them. It's more polite to their inbox.

A great photo storage site is Smugmug (www.smugmug.

com). It offers great storage plans, excellent customer service and security for files you don't want just anyone to see.

Question: How can I tell if someone has installed a keylogger or some other capture software on my PC to get my bank account information or whatever?

Answer: Run SpyBot Search and Destroy (a free download from www.filehippo.com) and delete what the program finds. While there you can download AdAware and the excellent free anti-virus product called AVG if you need them, too.

Keyloggers and other password-grabbing spyware are becoming more and more common. So it is a good idea to do a scan every couple weeks at least, especially if you are Internet active. You also can use Firefox or Opera browsers, both of which are less likely to allow Web-based spyware onto your PC when compared to Internet Explorer.

Question: I am trying to find Internet Explorer for the Mac and I read it was no longer available. What browser should I use with Mac OS X?