In computer news this week:

Lead: Are you an internet road hog?

As one who spends hundreds of monthly hours on the internet - I can actually see days where there are slowdowns.

There are a few very common mistakes people make when using the internet which add to the problem of Internet slow downs, and I'll go over some of the most common today, and what you can do to prevent them.

When you receive spam, the best thing to do is to just delete it and forget about it. Don't ever respond to a spam, and don't ever fall for their trick of having you click on some kind of "remove me from your mailing list" button, as doing so just verifies your email address to them and makes it more valuable when they sell it to the next spammer. Most people just grit their teeth and delete all spam they see in their email. If everyone replied to every spam, the internet would probably come to a screeching halt.

Some email from friends or friends of friends often is internet chain letter scams. A lot of time it preys on your good naturedness, like the one from a little school boy in Iowa who is doing a class project on how many people will respond to his email in a period of time, and won't you forward his email to everyone in your address book to put a smile on this little boy's face? Anything like this is a scam chain letter, and can result in millions of emails clogging the internet.

Another one I get regularly is one announcing that NPR is going bankrupt because Nina Totenberg announced that the other morning, and won't you forward this email to all your friends in support of NPR.

And there's the more dangerous virus scare emails that tell you that you have a virus file on your computer, - and you look - and sure enough it's on your computer - and you panic and delete the file and forward the email to everyone.

Some websites you can check on any similar chain letter and phony virus emails are scambusters.org - and hoaxbusters.ciac.org. Both sites track internet chain letters and scams and false virus alerts, and you can learn a lot from these sites.

Now my pet peeve of what slows down the internet is when people they send pictures of say - their cute little new grandchild - to everyone in their address book - usually a several megabyte file which takes hours for everyone to download. So you connect to your email - and then you have to wait for an hour for a gigantic email from someone to slowly download to your computer. If you are expecting an important email this is maddening and frustrating, and there's nothing you can do - you have to sit there and receive this humongous file that you don't want.

Here's how pictures should be handled. Almost any ISP give you as part of your internet service a free webspace, usually several megabytes. This is for you to have your own homepage, and to put here files and pictures you would like to share with friends. So instead of emailing that picture and alienating people and being an internet road hog, put that picture on your website, send an email to people telling them you have a cute picture of your grandchild or whatever, and if anyone wants to actually see the little gargoyle, you can include a link in your email to your website, and then those few people who actually want to see it can click on the link.

I know of no ISP's that don't provide your own personal webspace specifically for this situation. Believe me, you will win friends, influence people, and you will no longer be an internet road hog.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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