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If you have an account with an Internet service provider, you probably get some amount of online file storage and Web hosting as part of the deal. For example, Comcast gives each subscriber 25MB of file storage through its Personal Web Pages feature. Despite the fancy name, PWP is a standard file-transfer protocol (ftp) server that lets you upload and download files to and from your little corner of the Comcast server. Downloading is easy: Just type the complete URL of the file that you uploaded into the address bar of Windows Explorer or any Web browser, and the connection will start (after asking you for a user name and password, if the directory is password-protected).

Uploading files is a different story, however. Most Web-design programs include ftp client software for uploading your completed Web pages to the server. But sometimes you just want to upload an individual file, quickly and without fuss. Windows has provided a command-line ftp client with its operating systems since Windows 95, and the app is pretty easy to use once you know how. Choose Start, Run (just Start in Vista) and type cmd.exe to open a command prompt. Now type ftp to launch the ftp program's own command prompt. To see a list of available commands, enter ?. To start uploading, connect to the ftp server by using the command open server, where 'server' is the URL of the ftp server. For example, the command for connecting to Comcast's server is open upload.comcast.net. The server will then prompt you to enter a user name and password. To see a list of files and folders on the server, enter ls.

Before you can start uploading, the ftp program needs to know whether the files you plan to transmit are text files (such as .txt or HTML files) or binary files (just about any other type of file). If you apply the wrong setting to a file before transmitting it, you'll render it unreadable. To set ftp for text transmission, enter ascii; for binary files, type binary. To start file transmission, enter send. The ftp program will prompt you to supply the local file name; type or paste it in (be sure to enclose it in quotes if it contains spaces), and press <Enter>. To make this part easier, select the directory in Explorer containing the file you want to upload, before you launch the ftp program. That way, you need type only the file name, not the entire path. Next, enter the file's name, and press <Enter> again. Finish by typing close (to disconnect from the server) and then quit (to exit the ftp program).