Someone at Adobe Photoshop must be a Lou Reed fan because they've code-named the latest version in the making as "Venus in Furs'', a reference to his song about New York night life.

Photoshop is the program of choice for high-powered graphics editing in the publishing business, so those in the media, advertising and design sectors will be interested in the new release.

According to Apple Insider, an Internet publication that encourages those inside the various companies to rat on their employers, version six will have better text editing capabilities and an improved tool options bar.

Layer management, styles and masking have also been improved to make "any avid user feel warm and fuzzy inside''. All those pop up palettes can now be more easily managed.

The feature I like the most is the one described as the `Liquify Command''.

You can take an image and selectively warp it by pulling, twisting, enlarging and shrinking image areas using resizable brushes. You can also freeze areas of the image to prevent unwanted distortions.

No longer will you have to wait and see what your image looks like by attempting to warp someone's head with the pinch tool. You can read about all of the new Photoshop features at www.appleinsider.com.

For those who need to put their pictures on the Internet, keep them on the computer or make the occasional print-out, Photoshop may be too much and eats up too much memory. Plus it costs about $600.

I recommend using one of the free photo editing programs available at the www.zdnet.com download section. Try ImageForge for example.

No surprise stat: About 46 percent of US employees with Internet and e-mail access at work use the facility for personal reasons, according to a survey by the Angus Reid Group. About 55 percent of that number go online at work to receive and send personal e-mails.

Another study by Surfwatch estimated that 30 percent of an employee's time is wasted on the Internet in non-work-related content. A Media Metrix study estimated that number at 37 percent according to eMarketer.

Websense, another survey organisation, found two out of three companies had disciplined employees for misusing the Internet, and one out of three have fired at least one employee for personal Internet use.

Angus Reid had an interesting view on the subject. The survey firm concluded that personal use is a trade off. The firm argues that employees often take care of personal business that might result in a distraction from their work or absence altogether. So it's not all just aimless clicking away.

eMarketer adds that the productivity loss due to Internet usage at work is difficult to assess as employees also use the Internet at home for professional reasons.

Have you noticed your computer getting slower as time goes on? Computer system performance degrades rapidly due to fragmented files. Many companies often start costly hardware upgrades without first cleaning up their systems by running a defragmentation program through the hard drives.

File fragmentation is a necessary evil because it expands disk storage capacity. The computer works to save space on your hard drive by splitting up files into smaller pieces and placing the sections in the available clusters.

However the fragments are placed in non-contiguous blocks some of the times and the disk's read/write head has to jump from track to track to reassemble the pieces. Here's where the timer symbol pops up on your window while you read a book. It's like trying to play a CD where all the parts of the song are on different sections of the disc.

Files can sometimes take 10 to 15 times longer to access, and boot time tripled according to research company IDC.

A company's nightly back-up can take hours longer. Instead of spending a whole whack of cash on a new system try spending about $50 on some defragmentation software and scheduling a run through once a week.

Personal users can do the same thing by launching the disk defragmentation utility included with the Windows system. Simply go into Programs, Accessories, System Tools under the Start menu on your desktop and get your house in order.

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. Contact Ahmed at ahmedelamin y hotmail.com or (01133) 467901474.