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If you use portable drives (such as portable hard drives or USB thumb drives) to move data between work and home, there is always a risk you may lose the drive and thus compromise any potentially sensitive data on the drive. Fortunately, there is an excellent utility called TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org). This is a free disk encryption utility which can encrypt the contents of both hard drives and portable drives (through a feature called ?Traveller? mode) using industry standard encryption. This means if you lose your portable drive your data should be in a safe encrypted format. Just make sure you use a secure encryption pass key (password) to protect your data!

I am using a Macbook Pro running Window XP through Apple Boot Camp, connected to the internet through an ADSL D-link wireless router. When I initially set up the laptop it connected to the internet through Internet Explorer on Windows via the wireless network, and the same was possible on the Mac side using Safari. However, recently when I use Windows the laptop reports that it cannot find a wireless network in range. Windows reports the wireless adapter is working correctly. In contrast, on the Mac side the wireless network operates fine and the internet connects without any issues. I have connected to the internet via an Ethernet cable when I am in Windows and this also works fine. I followed your previous advice in terms of setting up the IP address and these are all set to automatic. No settings have been changed since purchasing the laptop.

Most times when closing Internet Explorer a series of messages appear saying ?The instruction at 0x036b38ae referenced memory at 0x037998b4. The memory could not be read. Click to terminate the program?. Each time I click to terminate the error the message reappears. This happens about 20 times before the message disappears for good. How can I get rid of this annoying message? It only seems to have appeared after updating my Norton Antivirus software.

The Windows Vista sidebar only comes with a few ?gadgets? by default, such as a clock, RSS reader and picture display. However, there are plenty more gadgets which can be added to the sidebar. These can be downloaded from the Windows Live Gallery at http://vista.gallery.microsoft.com .