Hotmail users can now get some help with sending photos as attachments. You're now able to do some basic editing of your photos before they're sent, particularly by being able to crop the photo. Also you'll notice photos are reduced to no more than 600 pixels in width or height to save time in posting them and to save any agony for the receiver on a poor dialup connection at the other end.
If you're running XP with service pack 2, you'll encounter the new security measures during the installation of the photo helper so here are a few hints. After you click on Attach on the Hotmail toolbar, the next page asks if you wish to install the new photo tool. Having clicked on Install, wait for few minutes, watching the status of the page at the bottom left of the browser window (it may begin by showing Done but wait a little longer and it will tell you it's Opening). A message will pop up asking you to Retry to re-load the page. Click Retry, and again wait, watching the left corner of the browser window. The Information Bar will come up eventually and you need to click it and agree to install the ActiveX control to do the final step. Wait a couple more minutes - you'll know you've had success when the Hotmail photo tool loads in your browser, pointing to your My Pictures folder showing thumbnails of any photos it finds there. Now you can change folders and choose the photos you wish to email, and perhaps do some editing before they're sent. Note that any editing you do at this stage doesn't affect the photos on your hard drive.
Finally, a reminder that Windows XP has a couple of very useful free tools to help us organise and make best use of our photos, namely Photo Story 3 and Movie Maker. You'll have to download and install version 3 of Photo Story but Movie Maker is already on your computer.
Photo Story 3 has some new featues and you'll find you can now remove the black area surrounding a photo and do some basic editing of the photo. As well, there's plenty of ways to change the way in which your photos are panned during playback as a movie.
Now's a good time to make sure your computer is free of adware and spyware and is protected against viruses and other nasties. So you should have downloaded and installed Lavasoft's free Ad-aware tool to scan for spyware and there are several free anti-virus programs. For example, AVG from www.grisoft.com (recently updated to version 7) and Anti-Vir from www.free-av.com.
Once those jobs are out of the way, you can have a look at new products such as Windows XP Media Center 2005 (yes, that's the correct spelling). The XP Media Center can't be purchased as a separate product and only comes installed on systems specially designed to run it but there is plenty of new hardware, such as TV tuner cards and media streaming devices, to turn your computer into your home multimedia centre.
