A most interesting and informative session from Tony Yates, with many useful contributions from the floor too.

Tonys PC had no internet connection to start with, so we set one up. Most people were surprised to realise that you don't need a magic CD from Tesco or whoever. All you need is one magic number: 0845 757 6333 (BT Click, the only cost is a local-rate call charge). Just create a new Dial-up networking entry with this phone number. It will require a username and password, just make them up!
The only hitch was that the Network settings needed changing- bind the TCP/IP protocol  to the  Dial-up network adapter (and of course a few restarts!). This is unusual and "you shouldnt need to do this at home."

A few other useful tidbits also emerged:

www.africam.com shows live pictures of animals in Africa.

www.eudoramail.com is a good web-email system. Prefered to hotmail which "dies" after a few days and results in bombardments of unsolicited emails.

www.twigger.co.uk is a web site that allows access to any POP3 email account via the web, ie from anywhere in the world.
This combines the benefits of an email account (such as virgin.net) and a web-mail account (such as eudoramail).

Demon Internet have a fax gateway which allows you to send a fax by email (Limited to 15 faxes per hour and 25 per week.)
Simply send email to  remote-printer.AAA/BBB@XXyyyyZZZZZZ.iddd.tpc.int
Change the above AAA BBB XX yyyy ZZZZZZ as follows:
AAA= Person's name (anything will do)
BBB= Room/Location (anything will do)
XX= Country code  eg 44 for UK
yyyy= Area code without the 0  eg 1753 for Slough
ZZZZZZ= Phone number.
For example to send a fax to 01753 893157 send email to:  remote-printer.T/T@441753893157.iddd.tpc.int

Computer-magazine cover-discs are a good source of share/free software, without the expense of huge downloads.
A good example is PC-Pro.

We looked at opera, a free (trial?) browser thats much faster than Netscape or Internet Exploder.
Its fast because it only has the essentials that you need, no cumbersome fancy gizmos.
Its also available for non-windows systems, including Linux and even good old OS/2!
Find it from www.google.com, generally regarded as the best search engine.