I find surfing the Web can be a thankless task, especially if I'm doing it for anything but fun. Search engines and Web indexes such as Alta Vista and Yahoo are useful, but even with them, using the Web still takes up valuable on-line minutes that I have to pay for. Besides using search engines, what can I do to reduce this hassle and to keep my dial-up bills down? JAKE PEREIRA Macau Just as off-line mail readers are now the rule rather than the exception, so off-line Web browsers are starting to catch on. With an off-line browser, a user instructs his or her computer to download a whole site.
The site can be downloaded overnight, or at some other non-busy time for the user. It can then be browsed off-line at the user's leisure without clocking up any more on-line time.
There are several packages to choose from.