Every now and then I get email rejection messages for emails that I never sent. Does this mean I have a virus? How can I stop this from happening?

You don’t have a virus. Somebody else does, and the program harvested your email address from their system.

Unfortunately there’s little you can do about the situation. Here’s how it works.

An email-based virus gets into somebody’s system and sends itself to everybody on the victim’s contact list. But instead of putting the victim’s address as the “from” address, the program randomly selects a different address for each email from his address book.

This way, when some of these messages are bounced, the rejection emails don’t all go back to the victim. And by random luck, one or more of them go to you.

Rest assured that the cause of the problem is not in your system.

The Motorola Q has already been called “the coolest smartphone in America.” It's a phone that plays music and videos, takes photos, and lets you send and receive e-mail.

Critics have said that the voice quality of the Q is among the best, whether you’re using the speakerphone, earpiece, or a Bluetooth headset.

The Q has most of the features of a Treo or BlackBerry, packed in a small, sleek package. At 2.5 inches wide and very flat half inch in thickness, the Q still has room for a 320-by-240 screen and a raised, angled QWERTY keyboard.

If you’re a BlackBerry user, you’ll be glad to know that this phone has the familiar wheel, along with a five-way cursor pad above the keyboard.

With support for Bluetooth stereo, the Q is a great music player for MP3, WMA, and protected WMA files downloaded from Microsoft-compatible music stores such as Yahoo! Music and Rhapsody.

On the email front, the Q comes with the Picsel Viewer for reading attachments, although you can’t edit these documents.

The Q also comes with a 1.3-megapixel camera.

A fully charged battery lasts about 5 hours 25 minutes, and the Q has 49MB of built-in storage so you can add additional programs.

Currently the Q is in limited release -- it is available from Verizon Wireless. Still, this is a nifty, versatile device for fun or pleasure, and we predict it will become very popular.

If you’ve developed a unique look for your word documents, you can permanently change the default settings in Microsoft Word.

This way your documents will always look the way you want them to look, and you won’t have to go back and reinvent the wheel with every new document. Here’s what you do:

In Word, click on Format on the menu bar and then click on Styles and Formatting. Click on the down arrow next to the word Normal and then choose Modify.

A dialogue box will open up, which lets you make changes such as font, style, size and color of the text, alignment, indentation, and single or double space.

Make the changes you want, and check the Add to template box at the bottom. Click OK when you’re finished.

Brent, why don't my MP3s sound like the real thing?

Most audio programs, such as iTunes, want to keep their files down to a small size. So they generally rip files at a rate of 128 kbps.

But when you do this to an uncompressed file from a CD, which usually has a native bit rate of around 1400 kbps, you’re obviously going to lose some sound quality.

Happily you can change this, by selecting a higher rip rate. Experiment with 160 kbps, 192 kbps, or even higher. Keep in mind that the higher the bitrate, the less music will fit on your player.

You should also check to make sure that your online store supports high enough audio quality to match your quality expectations.

There’s always going to be a tradeoff between small files and high sound quality. But no matter how good your speakers are, the quality of your audio files is what usually makes the real difference.

About 12% of the US population has listened to internet radio, according to recent data by Arbitron. Nine percent, or about 27 million Americans, have listened to a podcast.

Of course these percentages aren’t spread evenly over the population. The numbers increase as you look at groups with annual incomes of $100,000 or more.

And since nearly half of all teenagers own an IPod or other device for playing digital music, these numbers are bound to rise as these youngsters grow up.

Click here to go to Live 365's online radio music site.

Click here to go to iTunes's website.

PC World Confirms DCG's Approach to Hardware Procurement

Many of our customers know that DCG prefers to procure their hardware from online vendors like NewEgg.com and Dell.com.

PC World magazine recently surveyed their readers to learn their shopping/buying secrets. Thousands of respondents discussed the relative merits of online vs. brick-and-mortar shopping (hint: savvy buyers make the best of both worlds). They rated online stores for price, selection, ease of use, and the degree of support provided after purchase.

NewEgg.com, TigerDirect.com and Amazon.com came out as the clear online winners. Remember to approach unfamiliar online retailers with caution -- you should be very wary of prices that are too good to be true!

To view a table of the results, along with an in-depth article about readers' responses, click here.