Rob Pegoraro, agony aunt for the the digital age, answers computer users' questions.
Q: Are there any laptops made for use outdoors? My screen keeps washing out in sunlight.
A: Leaving aside the question of why you'd want to waste a sunny day by communing with a laptop, some portable computers do include screens that - unlike most - remain readable in direct sunlight.
A few models, such as the Toshiba Portege R500, incorporate what are called "transflective" screens.
Another, possibly easier, option is to get one of the increasing number of laptops that include a LED-backlit screen.
The light-emitting diodes behind their displays are much brighter than the usual fluorescent backlights.
For example, the screen on Apple's MacBook Air stands up to direct sunlight as long as you don't position it to reflect the sun right back in your eyes.
LED backlights also use less electricity, last longer and avoid the toxic chemicals required by standard backlights.
As their costs decline, they may become a standard ingredient in both computer monitors and flat-panel, liquid-crystal display TVs.
Q: What does "Ajax" mean when people talk about websites?
A: It's an acronym for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML," which is itself jargon for using JavaScript (the code that lets a web page respond to your instructions without talking to a faraway web-server computer) and XML (a language used to design a web page) to craft a site that looks and works much more like a regular computer program.
Compare, for instance, the operation of Google's Gmail with the "classic" version of Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail: The Google webmail site opens a new message and lets you label it without your having to reload the entire page.
Q: Is there any way to get rid of all the irrelevant stuff in the Services menus of the programs on my Mac?
A: The Services menu could be one of the best parts of Mac OS X.
It provides a common set of tools to your software, via a "Services" item in each program's application menu.
For example, to get a word count of an email message, I select the message's text, click on the Mail menu, scroll down to Services and select "Statistics . . ."
Unfortunately, Apple let this good idea get out of hand.
Programs commonly add their own entries to the Services menu, resulting in a long list cluttered with things you don't need (say, "ChineseTextConverter" or "OpenURLinRealPlayer").
The Services menu now reminds me too much of Windows' "tray", the minefield of tiny icons at the bottom right of the desktop - a dumping ground for developers with an exaggerated sense of their software's importance.
If you run OS X 10.4 Tiger, the free Service Scrubber (manytricks.com) can delete unwanted entries, but security measures in the current version of OS X Leopard stop this application from yanking all but a handful of services.
Apple needs to give users a way to clean up this mess.
Q: My Windows 98 computer throws up strange errors when I try to defragment its hard drive.
A: The point of "defragging" a drive - moving files around so the ones you open most often are next to each other and can be read faster - is to save time.
So spending lots of time debugging a defragger is likely to be counterproductive, and you might as well opt out of that chore.
Instead, put the time you spent on defragging into making regular back-ups of your data.
Ten-year-old computers don't have the best odds of seeing their 11th birthday. - Rob Pegoraro
