Q. Is it possible to install a spell-checker to work with Internet Explorer?

A. Indeed it is, and it is a free one. Speckie works with Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) onwards, and on all the popular versions of Windows. Launch a web browser, visit Speckie and when the page loads, click the Download link at the top. On the next screen, click the Download Speckie button and when the dialogue box appears, click Save. When the download is complete, click Run and when it asks to close down IE, click Yes. Follow the setup wizard and when it’s done, start Internet Explorer again. If IE’s information bar appears, click Enable to start Speckie. For many people, that is all there is to it: it is possible to use the browser as normal and let Speckie get to work. However, there are one or two other features worth exploring. Misspell a word, right-click on it and choose Speckie Settings from the menu. From here, it is possible to change various settings: the number of suggestions, the way misspelled words are highlighted and so on. The default dictionary is English (United States). To change this, click the ‘Get more dictionaries’ button.

Q. How can I get rid of pop-up advertisements?

A. To stop advertisements opening in new windows you need a pop-up blocker. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox have built-in pop-up blockers. In IE go to Tools, then Pop-up blocker to turn it on or change your settings. In Firefox, go to Tools then Options, then Content, and put a tick next to Block pop-up windows.

Q. I used to be able to save a shortcut to a website to my computer's desktop, and have the resulting icon look like the icon that the website uses in the browser's address bar. Now all of my shortcut icons look the same as the browser's icon. How can I customise them again? (An example of a customised website icon can be seen in the address bar above since invictamaid.org uses one.)

A. The creation of customised website shortcut icons is a useful feature of Internet Explorer. Just saving a website shortcut to your desktop will usually pick up the relevant customised icon - known as a favicon. I suspect that your loss of these customised icons is because you have changed the browser that you use to, say, Chrome or Firefox. Any shortcuts that you create whilst you use another browser will just take that browser's logo; only Internet Explorer supports customised icons. To recover the ability to customise these desktop shortcuts, your only option is to revert to using Internet Explorer.

Q. Is it safe to uninstall the browser (Internet Explorer) that came with my PC? I like to use Mozilla Firefox as my browser, and it drives me mad when Explorer pops up when I click on links.

A. It is not recommended to uninstall Internet Explorer: it is one of the basic features of the Windows operating system. Luckily you don't need to be this drastic: just set Firefox as your default browser. Open Firefox, go to Tools, Options, Advanced, and under System Defaults tick the box for “Always check to see if Firefox is default”. Now click the Check Now button to the side; this will trigger a pop-up window that will allow you to make it the default browser: the software the PC will use to open any web link. However, browsers do more than open web pages, and Internet Explorer might still be linked with other actions. To keep it out of the picture altogether, you would need to download and run something called Default Programs Editor, though I would not recommend going this far!