Sunday 16th March at 5pm

(Repeated Wednesday 19th March at 9.32pm)

Dolgellau special

This week a special edition of mousemat recorded in Dolgellau as part of BBC Wales Here For You campaign. Presenter Adam Walton visits Coleg Meirion Dwyfor to discover what IT courses are available, meets the makers of an innovative talking scanner and hears from a local farmer whose IT skills have led to a new business being set up. And our PC Doctor Simon Zerafa tackles a listener's PC problem

College courses

Adam chats to Marian Jones, Community co-ordinator at Coleg Meirion Dwyfor about the range of IT courses offered locally. For details you can call 0808 2020 444. Also we meet local farmer William Dunn who has now gained IT experience through various computer courses and set up a restaurant at the family farm with his brother who is a chef.

Chatterbox

Dolgellau based company Modern World Data have developed a talking scanner called Chatterbox. Adam chats to Michael Williams-Davies and Christine James and gets a demonstration of the scanner, which reads out text from books, newspapers, magazines and letters, for the unsighted and visually impaired.

Creative digital photography

Adam meets Graham Hall who runs the digital photography courses at Coleg Meirion Dwyfor - and discusses not just the technical side of photography, but how important it is to be creative.

PC Doctor

Simon Zerafa links up with Adam to answer a question from regular listener Graham Wharton "I use a PC for the net as well as Quark, Photoshop etc but find that the system is running slowly when I have 2 or more functions working at the same time. I have checked Properties to see if the memory is full but there is plenty of unused memory space. Someone told me about a thing called a Dual Core processor. Can you tell me something about it please? Is it easy to fit in? I have a tower system and have some space."

Simon says: So why might it be slow? You can use the Task Manager to tell how much CPU (processor) power and RAM (working memory) is being used. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del together brings up Task Manager - select Perfomance and this shows the amount of CPU and RAM usage. If your PC has less than 1GB (also called 1024MB) of RAM and is running XP, then you could consider upgrading the RAM. Also ideally you should have at least 25% remaining Hard Drive space ("C Drive"). If processor and RAM usage are very high then maybe something else is causing you a problem, such as malware. One program you can try to tackle this is called Super Anti Spyware, which has a free trial version.