Before starting the configuration, if you have not already made the Albedo.net webpage your homepage, type http://www.albedo.net/ into the Address: box and hit . This will take you to the Albedo.net home page, which will give you access to news bulletins, support pages, local archives of internet applications, and much more.

Now we are ready to begin.

To configure IE 6, click on the Tools menu and then on Internet Options.

This will bring up the Internet Options dialog box. There are six main sections, General, Security, Connections, Content, Programs, and Advanced. We will take them one at a time.

General Options

To set the Albedo.net page as the home page, click the [Use Current] button in the Home page section of the dialog box.

If you haven't already, the next thing you will probably want to change is the size of the folder used to cache webpages you have been to recently. Click the [Settings] button in the Temorary Internet files section in the middle of the dialog box.

Halfway down the dialog box that will appear is a slider titled Amount of disk space to use: Slide it almost all the way to the left. The number of megabytes that will be used will appear in the text box on the right.

You will need at most 12 MB for your temporary internet files. The number in the box can be fine-tuned by clicking on the little up- and down- arrows at the right-hand end of the box. When you are done, click [Ok].

Security Options

On the Security tab, you can set how paranoid you want IE to be for each of four zones, including a Local Intranet Zone, a Trusted Sites Zone, an Internet Zone, and a Resticted Sites Zone. This lets you protect your computer from "Potentially damaging content" (read ActiveX, Javascript, and Java) from some or most sites while still allowing them to be used with sites you trust or must trust whether you do or not.

The default for the Internet Zone, which includes all sites not explicity put into one of the other zones, is Medium, which warns you before running "Potentially damaging content". If you want to customize the security settings in IE 6, be careful. This feature was designed for corporate use, and it can be confusing to use.

Privacy Options

Unless you are an advanced user, it is probably best to leave the Privacy options at their defaults.

Content Options

The top section of this tab, Content Advisor, lets you set your IE browser to only allow pages with ratings you approve of to be seen. The internet has millions of websites, most of them built by people who do not even know how to apply ratings to thier webpages. Almost all quality educational and media websites are completely without ratings on their webpages. This is your warning: if you click on the [Enable] button, you will be able to ensure that the majority of worthwhile web resources are inaccessible from your browser.

The other sections, Cerificates and Personal Information, may be of use to you if you make use of services that require them, but are otherwise unlikely to matter to you.

Connections Options

You are unlikely to need to do anything at the Connection tab if you browser and e-mail are working properly.

You can start the Internet Connection Wizard again by clicking on the [Connect] button at the top of the dialog box. You may want to do this if you need to dial in to work or some other service as well as BBS 42 Internet, or if your Outlook Express e-mail is not working correctly and you need to start over. If you want to run this wizard, you can find the instructions here; if you can, print them out before you start. If you do make a new connection, it will be the one that is automatically dialed unless you specify otherwise as described in the next paragraph.

In the Dial-up settings section there is a list of the connections that you have set up. one of them will have (default) beside it - that is the one that will be automatically dialed. You can change which connection is automatically dialed and make adjustments to your preferences for any of your modem connections by clicking on the [Settings] button.

The other section, LAN Settings, is irrelevant if you are dialing in to BBS 42 Internet.

Program Options

On the Programs tab, you can set which programs are used for Mail: and News:. By default, both will be set to Outlook Express. You may want to set Mail: to Eudora Light if that is what you are using. To do that, click on the down-arrow at the end of the box and select Eudora Light from the list. (You can only do this after you have installed Eudora first, however.) This will let you send mail from your browser using whatever program you usually use.

Advanced Options

Microsoft has placed an entire kitchen sink of settings on the Advanced tab. Not all of the defaults are necessarily the best, but you should be cautious and change only one at a time if you want to adjust any of the settings. You will need to use the vertical scroll bar to see them all.

If you are not sure what you might have changed and some feature is not working, you can click on the [Restore Defaults] button to change them all back.