Pixel of the bunch: some models to look at if you're thinking of buying a digital camera for Christmas.
Guardian Online

Christmas games charts: The Getaway has unexpectedly snatched the top spot from the GTA: Vice City, the fastest selling game the UK has ever seen. Deprived of the top spot, Electronic Arts dominates the rest of the charts...
Games watch

Christmas is a good time to back-up your PC (please, not as an annual job) or important file even if it means splitting a large file across several floppy disks. Encrypting e-mail. Unable to switch identities in Outlook Express after installing Service Pack 1. Entering accents/accented characters in Outlook Express. Backchat: Mac firewalls and Partition Magic revisited.
Ask Jack

Chip designers have been putting amusing little drawings on some of their bits of silicon, and you can now see the photo-micrographs online. The Spamarchive is collecting spam. The BBC's Celebdaq (a UK site like the Hollywood Stock Exchange) is to become the basis for a TV programme. The Victorian Dictionary; the search for Great Britons; and Forced Migration Online. Six of the best: digital camera sites.
Guardian Web watch

The C drive is full but you still have lots of space on D: what can you do about it? Mac firewall software. Plugging a Sony PlayStation (or other games console) into a PC monitor. Opera 6 crashing -- it's an ad thing. The jdbgmgr.exe hoax "virus" is still going strong.
Ask Jack

Think about chips if you are buying a PC for Christmas. Under attack: what your firewall can tell you. If you have a router, you still need a firewall. Closing port 139. Outlook to go: a Rex was the smallest portable to synchronise with Outlook but some phones can do it too. Backchat: more websites about digital cameras, and OneTel's support for 64Kbps ISDN.
Guardian Online: Ask Jack

Comdex or CES? The balance has shifted to the Consumer Electronics Show, which is held in Las Vegas in January.
Computer Weekly