In the last column we talked about blogging - a daily journal of your thoughts and ideas and MSN Spaces was one place where you can set up your own for free - all you need is a free NET passport account (that is, a Hotmail account). MSN Spaces also enables you to have up to 10Mb of space for your photo albums to make it easier to share them with family and friends.

Once you've set up your space, go into the Customize section. Here you can pick a theme and colour scheme, decide which modules you want to use (e.g., you might want to remove the Profile and Updated modules), and move different modules around the screen. In particular, since you're going to concentrate on providing your visitors with the opportunity to view your photo albums, use the drag handle to move the photo album module to top centre.

Before uploading your photos, check that they're a reasonable size, that is, you'll soon use up your 10Mb of space if you try to show 1600 by 1200 photos saved directly from your camera! So use Irfanview to resize the photos you want to upload to a smaller size, say to 640 by 480 (saving them in a new sub-folder is a good idea so you keep the originals). If each photo is about 50 Kbytes in size, you'll be able to upload about 200 photos. Then use the Album feature to make several different collections that users can view. Note that people can download any of your photos too so it's an easy way to share them between family and friends.

MSN Spaces uses the same picture control as Hotmail which enables you to view your photos in My Pictures on your hard disk and then choose the ones you want to upload. However if you haven't used the Hotmail picture control to attach photos to your emails and you're using Windows XP you'll need to ask the person who has administrator privileges to help out to install the picture control for the first time.

When you're signed in to your Spaces, use the Storage feature under Settings to keep an eye on your available 10Mb. In the Storage section, you can delete some photos to make room for newer ones as well as delete a complete album.

If you want to share more photos than what's available at MSN Spaces, then try one of the sites listed in this week's column. Sharing photos online is a growing trend and more sites will appear in the near future.

If you've got a Windows XP system, somebody has to be in charge, that is, one person, and one person alone, has to have an administrator account. This person then allocates limited accounts to other users. If you're not sure of yourself when online, then as administrator, create a limited account to use when working on the Net so you're protected from accidently clicking to install something you later wish you hadn't.

Once set up this way, as administrator you're going to be pestered by the other users who want to download and install some piece of software: "Person-in=charge, I've just got to have it! Everybody else is using it! I won't be able to..." Before anything is installed, consider the consequences. In other words, do a quick search to read a couple of reviews about this "must-have" piece of software. If the reviews mention the possibility of adware, spyware, trojans or viruses being installed, then the answer has to be a definite "No!" otherwise your computer ends up becoming unusuable in a very short time, apart from the probability of personal information being stolen.

Apart from the above, the administrator should ensure automatic updates are turned on and watch for updates about the middle of each month. The MS Antispyware utility will take care of any adware, spyware and other nasties, and you'll find the free AVG antivirus tool looks after itself if you don't want to subscribe to a commercial one. You just need plenty of patience and diplomacy to educate your users!