My associate in Guangzhou wants to be in touch daily for two to three hours with me in Hong Kong and exchange large graphic files. Would you please advise which Internet service providers (ISPs) to use in the mainland and Hong Kong to enable us to use broadband speed or a dedicated Internet connection or any other high-speed connection? J. PANJABI Hong Kong The larger ISPs in Hong Kong, from Cable & Wireless HKT to Asia Online, have arrangements with counterparts on the mainland to establish special deals for users with high bandwidth connectivity needs. In your case, I suggest working with such an ISP to connect you and your Guangzhou partner to your local Internet exchanges using leased lines. The size of the line you get will depend on you; you will want to look at your budget and how much data throughput you expect to have. Remember, a leased line is operational 24 hours a day. Even if you and your partner stay on-line for only two to three hours a day, data transmission can occur the rest of the time if you have big files to send each other. I read your comments on the Palm V, and I'm curious to know if it's possible to upgrade its memory. If so, any suggestions on where and how will be appreciated. SUNIL HEMNANI Hong Kong Not only can you upgrade the memory of the Palm V, or any other Palm for that matter, you can also improve the performance of its processor. You can buy memory upgrade kits from dealers served by Synergy, the official Palm distributor in Hong Kong. Alternatively, shops at 298 Hennessy Road and Windsor House in Causeway Bay will do this for you. Ask around for the best price. Be warned, though, that performing such an upgrade through any but an authorised dealer would void the warranty on your Palm, so check before you hand your device over to be upgraded. In the meantime, go to www.backupbuddy.com and try out software called Cruise Control. It's a little program supposed to improve your Palm's performance marginally. By the way, you can also download a neat little Palm backup program of the same name from backupbuddy.com. Following my discussion on virus protection in the May 23 edition of Technology Post, reader Rennie Marques wrote in with some suggestions. 'Firstly, let me say that my e-mail reader is PINE on a Unix server, making it 99 per cent safer than Windows-based mail readers, including Netscape mail,' he wrote. 'Secondly, whenever I get an e-mail, I always check the sender rather than the subject line. If I don't recognise the sender, I then check the subject, in case a friend has changed service providers. If nothing rings a bell, or if it is obviously spam, I just delete it, because the mere act of reading it could trigger a response at the sender's end that my e-mail address is valid and open to more spam attacks. 'Thirdly, if anyone I know sends me an attachment, I always scan it with my anti-virus software program, and then double-check the major anti-virus Web pages for their latest warnings. 'A downloaded .exe file could sit for days before I do anything about it, which is a good thing because my sister sent me an .exe file which was supposedly kind of cute, and then sent me a warning a few hours later that it had triggered a virus alert on someone's computer. 'As for the ILOVEYOU.vbs terror, well, nobody loves me, so I didn't get it. However, even if I did, it would have sat on my hard drive or on my ISP's Unix server for a few days before I got around to looking at it, by which time I would have been warned. 'Obviously my method of madness is not for everybody, but it saves me a lot of grief, and it might just work for one or two of your readers.' I'd like to add that though Rennie's system of protection is fine for individual users connecting to the Internet through an ISP, it often does not work in an office environment dominated by Microsoft software, such as Outlook and Exchange. Larry Campbell is publisher of SCMP.com. The opinions expressed in this column are his own. E-mail comments and questions to techtalk@scmp.com . Questions to Tech Talk will not be answered personally. Technology Post reserves the right to edit letters.
