Q. My computer is full of valuable photos and I am keen to back them up more effectively. I use an external hard drive for this job, but is it safer to back up online in case of a fire or flood?
DO'R, Ireland
A. Uploading photos to an online service protects you against your hardware failing. Services such as Carbonite (www.carbonite.com), which charges £34 per year for "unlimited" storage, offer great software tools for performing automated back-ups. If you are concerned about entrusting cherished data to a small outfit, Microsoft - a firm unlikely to go bust - offers 25GB of free online storage (see skydrive.live.com) even if it is less flexible.
The big problem with online back-up is the sluggish speed of uploading data to the internet, which makes it practical for only, say, a gigabyte or two.
If you opt to keep your data at home, consider a resilient hard drive such as the SentrySafe QA004 (£213 at www.sentrysafes.co.uk). This sounds pricy for a 160GB unit but the maker says it can resist an 843C fire for up to 30 minutes and survive immersion in water for 24 hours. Alternatively, keep a DVD of your pictures at a different address.
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Q. My wife's laptop runs slowly, even though we have defragmented the hard drive. What else can we do?
BC, London
A. Disk defragmentation on a Windows-based machine tidies up the shards of files created as a result of the way they are written onto the hard disk in day-to-day use. The greater capacity of modern drives makes fragmentation less of a problem and if the laptop is running far more slowly, a defrag is unlikely to help much. Instead, run a full security scan, as the machine may have been compromised by either spyware or a virus. Should that not reveal anything, it's possible that either your Windows installation or your hard disk is faulty. To check the hardware, try the SeaTools diagnostic program offered free by Seagate, a well-known maker of drives (see tinyurl.com/ydywy4).
Note that as a hard drive grows full it becomes leaden. Installing more Ram could also help. You may, however, also need to reformat the hard drive and then reinstall Windows. This isn't a job for the faint-hearted and you must first back up your data. A reinstall should give your laptop a new lease of life, especially if it hasn't been done for a few years.
Q. Whenever I attempt to send e-mails from Outlook, I get an error message: "Relaying prohibited." How can I fix this?
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GB, via e-mail
A. It sounds as if you have switched your internet service provider (ISP) but not amended your e-mail software to reflect the change. When you send an e-mail it is forwarded to a predefined ISP. If you change the ISP but don't inform your e-mail program, it will continue to send it to the old address - and it will therefore be returned. To fix this you must tell your e-mail software that you have changed ISP. This is done in the settings that control outgoing e-mails, which can be adjusted from the Options menu of programs such as Outlook. They are known as SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol).
In order for your e-mails to be sent to the new ISP you will typically need to change the appropriate text box to something along the lines of SMTP.yournewISP.co.uk. The ISP can advise you, or read the generic guide at tinyurl.com/n67zra.
E-mail your technology queries to dontpanic@sunday-times.co.uk