Q: While looking for some new memory for my computer, I saw something called RIMM memory modules. What are these and will they fit my PC?

A: RIMM memory modules are the next generation of high-performance memory, based on the RAMBUS architecture, which means they are very fast. Unfortunately, like each new generation of memory before it, the physical connections to the motherboard are entirely different and incompatible. This means to take advantage of this new technology you must upgrade your motherboard (and, likely, your processor).

Q: I want to buy a notebook computer to use in my business. Do you have any pointers on what I should look out for?

A: Notebooks are continuing to become much more mainstream with prices coming down and specification going up. What you need to look out for largely depends on what you intend to use the notebook for.

I bought a notebook from Dell a couple of years ago mainly for its large screen to make it easier to demonstrate software to clients. Unfortunately, the trade-off to keep the price reasonable was it weighed slightly less than an equivalent-sized piece of concrete. Make sure you check out the weight, size (particularly height when closed), screen size, screen resolution, colour depth and battery life (and take the manufacturer's claim on battery life with a handful of salt). Ensure it has at least 64Mb of memory and a minimum of 5Gb of hard disc space.

Q: I have often heard HTML referred to when people talk about the internet. What exactly is it?

A: HTML stands for hypertext mark-up language. It is a means of describing document formatting within a web page. When you download a web page into your browser, the page is a text document containing textual content and references to images as well as a number of special "tags" to tell the browser how a given part of the page should be displayed.

For example, if you wanted to show a paragraph of text in bold format, it may look something like this in html: <b><p>some text</p></b>. There are a large number of different tags allowing for quite complex pages.

Q: MY computer has started to slow down and run at a snail's pace. I run Windows NT on a Pentium II 450mhz PC. Can you suggest some ways to speed it up?

A: One area you might look at is the amount of RAM you have available to run programmes. Press the Ctrl, Alt and Delete keys once simultaneously, then click the Task Manager button and select the Performance tab.

You are interested in the Total value in the physical memory and Mem Usage sections. If you are using more memory than you have, it is likely NT is using the hard disc a lot to simulate RAM. This is bad, since hard discs are on average at least a thousand times slower than memory. Either fit more memory or look at the programmes that are started automatically when Windows boots.